Lecture by Adam Frank (2018-2019 Paris IAS fellow) at the symposium "Beyond the Sentence - Stein as Open Text", organised by the Gertrude Stein European Network, Perdu, and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON)'s Modern and Contemporary Literature Research Group (Utrecht University)

Presentation

This daylong programme brings together both academic and artistic research that explores Stein’s writings as both the result of and catalyst for creative, collaborative engagements. We’ll examine how both Stein and her readers have positioned her work within various media ecologies and, ultimately, test the possibilities of reading it as an “open text”. As Lyn Hejinian, poet, translator, essayist and our keynote speaker, writes in “The Rejection of Closure”: “The ‘open text’, by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invited participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies.” The “open text” also rejects the definitive boundaries of different media and disciplines; thus we will insterpserse lectures and panel discussions with readings, collaborative translations, music and dance.

More information (Perdu website)