Tender Buttons

📖 The Scoop

Tender Buttons - Objects - Food - Rooms by Gertrude Stein. Tender Buttons is a 1914 book by American writer Gertrude Stein consisting of three sections titled "Objects", "Food", and "Rooms". While the short book consists of multiple poems covering the everyday mundane, Stein's experimental use of language renders the poems unorthodox and their subjects unfamiliar. Stein began composition of the book in 1912 with multiple short prose poems in an effort to "create a word relationship between the word and the things seen" using a "realist" perspective. She then published it in three sections as her second book in 1914. Tender Buttons is renowned for its Modernist approach to portraying the everyday object and is lauded as a "masterpiece of verbal Cubism". Its first poem, "A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass", is arguable its most famous and is usually cited as one of the quintessential pieces of Cubist literature. While it has been praised for its avant-garde approach at portraying the mundane, it has also been criticized as "a modernist triumph, a spectacular failure, a collection of confusing gibberish, and an intentional hoax". Rather than using conventional syntax, Stein experiments with alternative grammar to emphasize the role of rhythm and sound in an object's "moment of consciousness". The disconnect between the familiarity of the objects and the manner in which they are described results in the defamiliarization of the familiar while simultaneously familiarizing the unfamiliar. Rather than explore the means in which the signified and the signifier interact, Stein's avant-garde approach to writing deconstructs this relationship and instead obstructs a systematized process of meaning. By both redefining and undermining meaning merely through experimental grammar, Stein is able to displace everyday objects into new contexts, resulting in the reader's redefinition and reassessment of the reality of the mundane.

Genre: Poetry / Women Authors (fancy, right?)