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Radio Free Stein

Radio Free Stein

Gertrude Stein's Parlor Plays

by Adam J. Frank

Imprint: Northwestern University Press

192 Pages, 7.00 x 7.00 in, 32 b-w halftones

Paperback
9780810148062
Published: December 2024

$34.00

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Hardcover
9780810148079
Published: December 2024

$100.00

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eBook
9780810148086
Published: December 2024

$34.00

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

Returns us to Gertrude Stein’s theater by way of the modernist medium of radio

What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts’ unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.

Prologue: The Radio Free Stein project
Essay 1: Gertrude Stein's Radio Audience
Interlude 1: What Happened | Plays - a radio script
Essay 2: Speech, Acts, Parlor Plays: Stein with Austin
Interlude 2: What Happened | Plays - a score (Samuel Vriezen)
Essay 3: Composing What Happened (Samuel Vriezen)
Appendix: Recording and Performance
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

ADAM J. FRANK is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. His books include Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol and, coauthored with Elizabeth Wilson, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook. He is the creator and producer of the Radio Free Stein critical sound project, available at radiofreestein.com.

"With dazzling online recordings and scripts, Radio Free Stein takes readers backstage to reveal the inventive workshop process Adam Frank has used in productions of Gertrude Stein’s early voice plays. The 1934 NBC radio interview Stein gave on her US tour resonated with her playwriting “by making audience available as feeling” and Frank brilliantly renders this insight in productions that capture the plays’ strange and arresting illocutionary force."—Linda Voris, American University

“Radio Free Stein’s fluent roving across considerations of performance, psychoanalytic theorization of the radio, and philosophical and queer theories of the performative is brilliant and compelling. This is a significant contribution to both Stein studies and modern theater studies, as well as media and modernist studies.”—E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University