THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the sixth in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. We consider the work’s hybrid genre, a mix of faux-autobiography, biography, and novel; the relationship between the aesthetic and the domestic as gendered spheres in a portrait of “wives” and “geniuses”; its expression of Stein’s theories of culture, nationality, literary history, and composition; and the disputed eminence of Stein, despite her centrality to modernism, from her own time, when even sympathetic critics called her unreadable, to the present, when she has been revealed to present another case of modernist fascism. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall: