by Karin Cope
This was my PhD thesis--will see if I can find any links to it or portions of it. This study was thoroughly revised--indeed, rethought entirely in my book, Passionate Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein (ELS 2005).
As Gertrude Stein completed The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress, she sought to dispense... more
As Gertrude Stein completed The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress, she sought to dispense with dependency, whether of one clause on another, form upon theme, or cultural reproduction upon heterosexual models. In A Long Gay Book, she began to write in the style which would articulate the remainder of her work, establishing a perverse, or, in her parlance, 'gay' relationship in and to the terms of her paternal predecessors. Trading 'description' (illustrative or narrative modes) for 'composition,' Stein and Picasso produced a new model of relationship, based on perverse or 'gay' modes of cultural reproduction. Without imitating or becoming dependent upon one another, they took each other as models in a variety of ways. Enabled 'together and apart,' each created in his or her medium, queer, provocative, and highly influential modes of thought.
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