Anybody's Everybody

Juliana Spahr based on her reading of the autobiographies and the multilingual context of the composition of Stein's work argues that

It is not that Stein's fragmentation is in itself necessarily revolutionary, but rather that her alignment of it with immigrant and other nonstandard Englishes provides a new perspective on the ramifications of fragmentation. And most importantly, it points to the importance of linguistic patience and respect in a country where everyone might not be fully fluent.

From "'There Is No Way of Speaking English' The Polylingual Grammars of Gertrude Stein" in Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity.

And it so happens per chance that I come across in the same day's reading a quotation from Denise Riley (The Words of Selves) as selected by Norma Cole in a talk collected in To Be At Music

Any I seems to speak for and from herself; her utterance comes from her own mouth in the first person pronoun which is hers, if only for just so long as she pronounces it. Yet as a human speaker, she knows that it's also everyone's, and that this grammatical offer of uniqueness is untrue, always snatched away. The I which speaks out from only one place is simultaneously everyone's everywhere; it's the linguistic marker of rarity but is always also aggressively democratic.

Last word to Spahr on Stein

It [Stein's work] turns populist speech patterns into art. It argues that this art which appears strange and unusual to some can have roots in the common, the everyday, can include everybody. [...] We cannot afford to overlook works that suggest alternate ways of speaking English. Or, in other words, if Stein is not the democrat that I am arguing her work suggests she could be, still there is much to be learned from the anarchic democracy of the works themselves.

One can. Learn. One did. And does.

And so for day 1211
07.04.2010