Passionate Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein

"Passionate Collaborations takes Stein's life and her prose as an occasion to reflect upon the place of "life" or "living" -- in all of its intricate, messy, contradictory, elusive and mundane details -- in acts of reading and writing. By exploring -- through phenomenologically and psychoanalytically inflected lenses -- a series of documented historical, collaborative, combative, and conflictual relationships with Stein, her writings, and reputation, Passionate Collaborations lays the groundwork for a reconsideration of contemporary approaches to Stein's work, as well as other acts of reading, and the practice of criticism in general. Written increasingly in dialogue and concluding with a paly, Passionate Collaborations invites its readers, too, into the space of and for a passionate collaboration, a space where writing listens to and calls for attention to the manifold variety and detail of bodily experience, living, and feeling. In its very form, the text demonstrates that serious theorizing and criticism may take place in a variety of ostensibly "uncritical" modes of languages; that the practice of drama or fiction are not merely objects of critical theory, but, often enough, its very best medium."