American Nervousness and the Theater

The Story of Gertrude Stein’s Therapeutic Aesthetics
2026
ISBN: 978-3-7705-6959-5
Verlag: Wilhelm Fink Verlag

Buch, Englisch, 388 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm

Gertrude Stein developed a groundbreaking theory of theater that has long gone unrecognized. Bringing together cultural critique and therapeutic thinking, her work links the analysis of social theatricality in modern American culture with innovative models of aesthetic experience.
Rather than in authoritative manifestos, Stein develops this theatrical thinking across novels, essays and autobiographical writings. This book offers the first sustained account of Stein as a theater theorist, showing how her work emerges in critical dialogue with contemporary philosophical, psychological and cultural debates. It demonstrates how Stein's writing intervenes in modern regimes of attention, reading and spectatorship, while reimagining the relationship between literature, theater and everyday practices of self-formation.
By situating Stein within broader histories of knowledge, this study reveals her as an incisive voice in twentieth-century debates on social theatricality and modern theater.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jost, Torsten

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft

Über Autor(innen)

Torsten Jost is a theatre and performance scholar at Freie Universität Berlin and a researcher in the Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective." His work focuses on modern theatre histories and spectatorship as an epistemic practice, with a particular interest in global performance cultures