Just as the postimpressionists and cubists made us see paint and then made us see painting, Gertrude Stein made us see words and then made us see writing. Immensely various and wide-ranging, her work amounts to a systematic investigation of the formal elements of language (parts of speech, syntax, phonetics, morphemics, etymology, punctuation) and of literature (narrative, poetry, prose, drama, and genre itself). In the course of these investigations, as Marianne DeKoven has pointed out, Stein reinvented literary signification (in "the most substantial and successful body of experimental writing in English"), creating a language that both disrupts conventional modes of signification and provides alternatives to them: "The modes Stein disrupts are linear, orderly, closed, hierarchical, sensible, coherent, referential, and heavily focused on the signified. The modes she substitutes are incoherent, open-ended, anarchic, irreducibly multiple, often focused on what Roland Barthes calls the 'magic of the signifier.'"

America...