Spreading The Difference: Pamela Hadas Tender Buttons Analysis
Andrea Proimos
ENG 220-003
Final Essay
SVONKIN
Gertrude Stein and Cubist Poetry
In the essay, “Spreading the Difference: One Way to Read Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons” Pamela Hadas describes the meaning behind Gertrude Stein’s unusual work Tender Buttons. While Pamela Hadas sees a two dimensional meaning in Stein’s work I argue that there is a modernist style used in Gertrude Stein’s work that is inspired from the cubist movement in art and philosophy. Pamela Hadas does not find Gertrude Stein’s work incomprehensible like so many others. Hadas sees an unconventional coded style of writing in Tender Buttons using: words, biographical elements that especially deal with her personal relationships, and universal themes of difference to drive meaning in her writing. Pamela Hadas shows the innovation and unique usage of Stein’s language.
In an interview with Robert Haas in 1946 Stein claims that she became interested in individual words (as oppose to paragraphs or sentences), “I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to one another word, and at this same time I found out very soon that there …show more content…
Her writing provides more than a possible glimpse of what she experienced in her life and is more complex than Pamela Hadas gives her credit for in the article, “Spreading the Difference: One Way to Read Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.” Through philosophical understanding, range of magnitude in dimension and time, repetition, and other unique elements Gertrude Stein creates writing that is in many ways like cubist art. One must take their time and realize something new and different each time they read it, sound it out in order to hear it, and will in turn feel something that’s never been felt before; a phenomenon of a new understanding and an achievement of higher
ENG 220-003
Final Essay
SVONKIN
Gertrude Stein and Cubist Poetry
In the essay, “Spreading the Difference: One Way to Read Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons” Pamela Hadas describes the meaning behind Gertrude Stein’s unusual work Tender Buttons. While Pamela Hadas sees a two dimensional meaning in Stein’s work I argue that there is a modernist style used in Gertrude Stein’s work that is inspired from the cubist movement in art and philosophy. Pamela Hadas does not find Gertrude Stein’s work incomprehensible like so many others. Hadas sees an unconventional coded style of writing in Tender Buttons using: words, biographical elements that especially deal with her personal relationships, and universal themes of difference to drive meaning in her writing. Pamela Hadas shows the innovation and unique usage of Stein’s language.
In an interview with Robert Haas in 1946 Stein claims that she became interested in individual words (as oppose to paragraphs or sentences), “I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to one another word, and at this same time I found out very soon that there …show more content…
Her writing provides more than a possible glimpse of what she experienced in her life and is more complex than Pamela Hadas gives her credit for in the article, “Spreading the Difference: One Way to Read Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.” Through philosophical understanding, range of magnitude in dimension and time, repetition, and other unique elements Gertrude Stein creates writing that is in many ways like cubist art. One must take their time and realize something new and different each time they read it, sound it out in order to hear it, and will in turn feel something that’s never been felt before; a phenomenon of a new understanding and an achievement of higher