SOURCE: "The Poetics of Event: Stein, the Avant-Garde, and the Aesthetic Turn of Philosophy," in Sagetrieb, Vol. 12, No. 3, Winter, 1993, pp. 125-48.

In the following excerpt, Ziarek discusses "Patriarchal Poetry" as an avant-garde work of rebellion against traditional poetic styles.

Apart from explicit references to pleasure and liking, Stein's writing generates a sense of enjoyment specifically through its patterns of repetition and its continuous undermining and putting in play of grammatical and logical rules. In Stein's texts, anxiety arises in the face of the impossibility of imposing the strictures of understanding and interpretation upon them. When allowed to unfold in their own idiosyncratic way, Stein's works can be more readily described, as many critics have remarked, through playfulness, irony, pleasure, perhaps even jouissance, which would make those texts closer to écriture féminine and its feminist concerns. For even though Stein subverts literary and linguistic conventions in order nearly...