Le latitudini del modernismo

Parlando di Stein: Mena Mitrano e Marina Morbiducci in conversazione

Abstract

Our conversation tries to contextualize the experimental work of Gertrude Stein in the lively and
inspiring debate on the meaning of the concept of modernism, of its transformation and expansion in
the twenty-first century, especially after the New Modernist Studies. We consider how Stein’s writing,
whose centrality to the literary-critical canon today owes to the groundbreaking feminist scholarship of
the past few decades, is particularly attuned to the planetary modernism embraced by contemporary
scholars, as manifest both in some of her cross-spatial and cross-temporal literary heroines, and in her
anti-canonical presence, which causes the canon to be always a notion in flux. In our conversation,
Stein comes across as the inventor of “literary thinking” and calls for an ampler practice of literature
that implies a wide plane or a continuum of art-language-thought. Stein’s modernism amounts to that
crossing and re-crossing of the boundaries (of discourses, genres, and fields) which, in recent times, has
inspired the most influential literary and critical thinkers. Marina Morbiducci’s translation practice
becomes the vantage point from which this conversation can illuminate the hopeful modernism of a
writer whose critique of representation and experimentalism were only the consequence of her search
for what we might call living writing.