This programme is produced by Gertrude Stein European Network, Perdu and Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON)'s Modern and Contemporary Literature Research Group (Utrecht University). Organized by Mia You, Tim Elfring and Sophie Barklamb (Utrecht University), and Flora Woudstra and Lucie Fortuin (Perdu)

During this daylong symposium on the modernist writer Gertrude Stein, we will bring together both academic and artistic research to explore Stein’s writings as both the result of and catalyst for creative, collaborative engagements. We’ll consider how both Stein and her readers have positioned her work within various media ecologies and, ultimately, test the possibilities of reading it as an “open text.” As Lyn Hejinian writes in “The Rejection of Closure:” “The ‘open text,’ by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies.” The “open text” also rejects the definitive boundaries of different media and disciplines; thus, lectures and roundtable discussions will be interspersed with collaborative (and multilingual) readings, collective discussions, and music and dance performances.

The keynote lecture will be delivered by poet, translator and essayist Lyn Hejinian (John F. Hotchkis Professor of English at U.C. Berkeley).

A detailed program will be posted here.