Epilogue

Abstract

In all her writing, Stein’s interest was to push the limits of her medium. She made printed texts which preserved and conveyed the process of their own composition, thereby defying the conventional literary sacrifice of process to product. She used an opaque language which asserted its materiality at every turn, thereby challenging the use of language in literature as a transparent instrument of representation. She confronted each genre she used, probing its rules, problems and paradoxes. Her work embodies her critique of, her ideas about and her deconstruction of literature. A Stein text is at once a work of art and a work of criticism; in it, the writer is at once creating and thinking about creation.