essay -gertrude stein and the sounded jouissant

Lifting Belly is often considered the central erotic work of Gertrude Stein's middle period...this love poem, associative in structure, consists of alternately cryptic and conversational fragments detailing elements of sounded spaces from within a domestic sphere. The language is jouissant. But the language of jouissance in Stein’s Belly works as a vocabulary of ecstasy that is far beyond the stable and mere pleasure of the body or the text. This ‘unform of language’, functions as ecstasy through sounded sound...

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