Landscape And Identity As Viewed By Gertrude Stein

Abstract

This study attempts to show how geographical environment and especially landscape that encompass the person affects their understanding of themselves and shapes their identities. As for methodology, the topic will be approached form a geocritical point of view that gives much emphasis for the American landscape: how it helped in creating a national identity and promoted the country celebrity. The landscape and identity issues will be perceived through the vision of Gertrude Stein one of the most controversial thinkers and avant-guard writers who out lived the nineteenth century and left their stamps printed on twentieth century generations. This French expatriate of American origin, through an outstanding and prolific writings acted as the ambassador for modernism. The study also sheds some light on the strikingly conspicuous fluctuations Stein made in writing as repetition and punctuation remained one of her mysteries and talents of style. It is not strange when Williams Carlos Williams who got both amazed and impressed with Stein' s language and described it as" smashing every connotation that words have ever had, in order to get them back clean".