格特鲁德·斯泰因是何时成为诗人的？(英文)

When Did Gertrude Stein Become a Poet?

近二、三十年来,格特鲁德·斯泰因作为20世纪重要诗人之一的地位已经在美国文学研究领域被广为接受,然而,在她数百篇实验性作品中哪些可以归于诗歌文类、她关于诗歌的定义在其文学生涯中可能有怎样的变化,学界对此还不十分清晰。鉴于此,本文将重新审视创作于《美国人的创造》(成稿于1911)与《软纽扣》(1914)之间的过渡性作品,尤其是《断袖之书》,探讨这些作品是否能够支撑斯泰因的《美国讲稿》中关于她作为诗人之渊源的观点。本文还将从斯泰因作为诗歌创作的文本中去探究是否能够探查到隐含于文本之中的某种关于诗歌建构的理论的演变轨迹,并将对斯泰因关于散文/诗歌分界与后来的批评家关于其具体文本分类之间的观点进行比较研究。21世纪之初,学界在诗与非诗的观念上有着激烈的论争,而斯泰因的名字作为文学形式与文类当代实验的典范和先驱始终突出地深陷于这种争论之中,因此,重新回到她的作品并且弄清她本人有意识地创作的是什么,有助于我们更加清晰准确地面对当前的这些学术争论。

Gertrude Stein has, over the last generation, become well established in the American literary study as one of the country’s major 20th-century poets. It is not entirely clear, however, which of her hundreds of experimental writings ought to belong under the heading of poetry, nor, indeed, how her definition of poetry might have shifted over the course of her career. In my paper, I plan（1） to revisit the transitional writings between Making of the Americans（manuscript completed 1911） and Tender Buttons（1914）, especially A Long Gay Book, and see whether they support Stein’s argument in Lectures in America concerning her origins as a poet;（2） to explore whether, based on texts that Stein designated as poems at the time of their composition, we can trace the evolution of an implicit theory of what constitutes poetry; and（3） compare Stein’s own sense of the prose/poetry divide to later critics’ decisions regarding how to categorize particular texts. At the beginning of the 21 st century, we are going through a period when what does and does not count as a poem is a subject of fierce scholarly debate, and Stein’s name figures prominently and regularly in these arguments as a model and precedent for contemporary experimentation with form and genre; by returning to her writings and ascertaining what, precisely, she saw herself as doing, it prepares us to re-engage these present-day discussions with increased clarity and accuracy.