Sound Recording Technology and American Literature

"When Gertrude Stein published Three Lives, her first book-length work, in 1909, readers were struck by her peculiar, repetitive style. As one dust jacket review put it, Stein's prose was like a "stubborn phonograph." Taken in passing, the comparison might seem unremarkable, but in 1909, when the phonograph was still a relatively new technology, the dust jacket remark penned by Georgiana Goddard King (a Reader in English at Bryn Mawr College) reveals how at least one early reader heard Gertrude Stein. According to King, Stein had "pushed the method of realism as far as it would go," and "the patient iteration, the odd style, with all its stops and starts, like a stubborn phonograph, are a part of the incantation. The reader must take it or leave it,-but always, taken or left, it remains astonishing.""--