Gertrude Stein: the Original Texter

In Paris this semester, my students are reading, among others, Gertrude Stein. Or, as Stein would put it, In Paris this semester my students are reading among others Gertrude Stein. Stein is famous, of course, for her eclectic use of commas, repetition, inverted syntax, absence of question marks, and other tricks of her Modernist trade. In an essay on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, one student focused on what she deemed Stein’s “poor grammar.” My student wasn’t the first to label...