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oai:null:10339/391262026-09-18T13:50:37Zcom_10339_14934col_10339_38132

Williams, Katherine Mills 2014-01-15T09:35:31Z 2015-01-15T09:30:09Z 2013 https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/handle/10339/39126 A study of Gertrude Stein's poetry collection Tender Buttons, this thesis uncovers and explores the text's covert maternal trope. Although Stein staunchly evaded categorization as a feminist, the employment of maternal imagery and the exploration of a language predicated by the feminine space of the womb warrant a reassessment of Stein's stance on feminism. This thesis identifies and elucidates the poetic exploration of the womb as a space containing one not yet formed, that is, the unnamed, ungendered, uninscribed in the restrictive and hegemonic yoke of culture. In this space, Stein delights in the indeterminacy of a language not yet born into the society that prescribes it to a single denotative method. Through consideration of French Feminism, this thesis identifies Stein's poetry as a harbinger of Kristeva's semiotic register yet resists its categorization as feminist. Interpreting Tender Buttons instead as a portent of diachronic linguistics, I hope to extend the analysis of the collection beyond the feminist position that increasingly dominates Stein scholarship. Positing the collection as an attempt toward the nullification of gendered writing, I suggest the potential to divest the employment of the female body as a tool solely for the construction of a feminist/linguistic argument. en Wake Forest University experimental poetry feminism Gertrude Stein maternal poetics Tender Buttons "Sometime There is Breath": Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons as Maternal Lexicon Thesis DeShazer, Mary K. Overing, Gillian Hena, Omaar English 2015-01-15 open.access