Really Melanctha: Nesting Subjects in Gertrude Stein's Intertexts

• Published in: Auto/biography studies Vol. 31; no. 2; pp. 285 - 307
• Main Author: Finck, Shannon
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 03.05.2016
• ISSN: 0898-9575; 2151-7290
• DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2016.1138355

"Really Melanctha" examines two early works, "Melanctha" and Q.E.D., alongside Stein's more recognizably radical late prose experiments with autobiography. Resituating the early writing within a career-long life-writing project, this essay recovers "Melanctha" from a harsh reception history and reimagines it as a nascent form of the subjective play lauded in the later works. By putting Stein's interests in writing the self in direct conversation with key contemporary theorizations of the subject, such as Rei Terada's "self-differential self," this essay argues that what has previously been read as a coding or masking of queer concerns within race can, instead, be read as a demonstration (QED) of play with subjective boundaries, cultural identities, and empathetic responses to difference.