Collaborating with Gertrude Stein : Media ecologies, reception, poetics

Abstract: The reception of the American avant-garde poet, playwright, art collector and salon hostess Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) has to a wide extent taken place in an aesthetic context prior to her work’s academic and hermeneutic canonization. This thesis is in part a mapping of this transmedia reception as it is played out in a North American context in the period from her death and until today, and in part an account of Stein’s particular collaborative poetics, through which her work invites such a reception. Furthermore, the thesis maintains that we in a contemporary context are experien­cing a still increasing receptivity towards Stein’s oeuvre, that seems more relevant today than ever before.  These circumstances, the thesis illuminates and discusses via a media theoretical framework, where Stein’s own work, as well as its aesthetic reception is considered as embedded in a complex media ecology. Media ecology is here conceived as a de­centralized, networked approach to aesthetic phenomena, which is able to contain many types of agents and materialities. The media ecology of an artwork is thus po­tentially made up by the entire network of processes, agents and materials that are relevant to its production, distribution and consumption and influences the subject positions available to the individual agents.Through Stein’s aesthetic reception it is possible to catch sight of important compo­nents that are active in the media ecology but often neglected or considered subor­dinated to text-internal features. These include the material interface of the medium in question, the aestheticized persona of the artist and infrastructures such as the salon, which affect how and to whom the work and its meanings are distributed. The thesis also traces a number of parallels between the media situation of Stein in the beginning of the 20th century and the digital media situation at the verge of the 21st that suggest both explanations for and implications of her increasing contemporary relevance.