Le Latitudini del Modernismo. Parlando di Stein: Mena Mitrano e Marina Morbiducci in Conversazione

Our conversation aims to contextualize Gertrude Stein’s experimental work in the lively and inspiring debate on the meaning of modernism, of its transformation and expansion in the twenty-first century, especially after the New Modernist Studies. We consider how Stein’s writing, whose centrality to the literary-critical canon today owes to the groundbreaking feminist scholarship of the past few decades, is particularly attuned to the planetary modernism embraced by contemporary scholars, as manifest both in some of her cross-spatial and cross-temporal literary heroines, and in her anti-canonical presence, which causes the canon to be always a notion in flux. In our conversation, Stein comes across as the inventor of “literary thinking” and calls for an ampler practice of literature that implies a wide plane or a continuum of art-language-thought. Stein’s modernism amounts to that crossing and re-crossing of the boundaries (of discourses, genres, and fields) which, in recent times, has inspired the most influential literary and critical thinkers. Marina Morbiducci’s translation practice becomes the vantage point from which this conversation can illuminate the hopeful modernism of a writer whose critique of representation and experimentalism were only the consequence of her search for what we might call living writing.