“A rose is a rose is a rose,” wrote Gertrude Stein, who added that for the first time in 500 years of English literature, the rose was red. Stein lived at the center of the 20th century’s avant-garde movement, re-inventing the English language from her apartment in Paris. Her writings remain revolutionary: read her now, and you might think you’re reading books that have yet to be written. Taking the word as material instead of as an abstraction of meaning, Stein stripped language of its symbolism and returned it to sound, even as she reduced Romantic literary themes to a strange, ordinary world. Tender Buttons is a sequence of prose poems on such topics as roast beef, coffee, cushion, chair, piano. This course will consider Stein among her contemporaries, including Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, and others. We will think about her as a radical writer and as a reactionary in her politics (like so many of the Modernists). We will examine her feminism, alongside her work for the pro-Nazi regime of Petain. Complicated she was, and this course will be enriched by her paradoxes. Readings will include the two Library of America volumes of her work; Jaimie Gusman Nagle’s Gertrude’s Attic and other responses to Stein’s influence, and a flurry of essays on the avant-garde and her historical period. Students will give oral reports on artistic and political contexts and also write two essays. They will compose Steinian works of their own. There will be a weekly blog post to write and lots of in-class fun. (Reading Stein out loud is a cheap high.)