Shoshana Olidort: "Tender, Lingering: Gertrude Stein's Surface Poetics"

Date
Wed February 20th 2019, 6:30 - 8:30pm
Location
Stanford Humanities Center Boardroom

Speaker(s): Shoshana Olidort

Gertrude Stein’s poetry often strikes readers as hermetically sealed, impossible to access or penetrate. Indeed, Stein’s poems seem to actively resist a hermeneutic reading, instead drawing the reader back to the surface of the poem, to the language that forms the poem’s textual surface. In this chapter, I focus on the performance of identity as it unfolds, through repetition, diction, and subversive grammatical and syntactical arrangements, on the surface of Stein’s poetry. I argue that the surface poetics Stein espouses is bound up with her identity as a woman, a lesbian, and a Jew and that it thus enacts a profoundly political gesture of resistance to prevailing norms and forms of “patriarchal poetry.”

Shoshana Olidort is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature. She is currently at work on a dissertation tentatively titled "Performing Intersectional Identities: Five Jewish Women Poets in the 20th Century," which explores poetry as a mode of identity performance through a consideration of works in Hebrew, Yiddish and English. In addition to her scholarly work, Olidort is a critic, translator and poet. Her reviews, essays and interviews has appeared in the  Los Angeles Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, and The Jewish Review of Books. Her poems and translations have appeared in publications including In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies and Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies. Olidort is also poetry editor of Mantis, for which she has curated features on contemporary Hebrew poetry, new female poetry, and red state poetry. 

Jesse Nathan is completing a Ph.D. in the English Department. His dissertation, Poets' Poets, rethinks influence between Victorian poets (Robert Browning, Hopkins, Swinburne, Arnold) and American poets (Pound, Moore, Hart Crane, Stevens) at the beginning of the twentieth century, developing a Winnicottian understanding of the exchange, theorized explicitly in an opening chapter called After As Before.