ABSTRACT
In her essay, “Plays,” modernist author Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) examines her anxiety over traditional theatrical experience, which derives from a perceived temporal disjunction between the viewer's emotions and the events enacted on stage. Stein juxtaposes the problems of knowledge and emotion presented by this disjunction and urges the primacy of language in theatrical experience. The essay is written in a repetitive and experimental prose style that mirrors Stein's syntactic innovations in her noncritical creative work.
