Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein

I situate the controversial critical strategies of distant reading and surface reading in the reception history of Gertrude Stein, an author whose work was frequently declared “unreadable.” I argue that an early twentieth-century history of compromised forms of reading, including women’s reading and information work, subtends both the technology with which distant reading may be carried out and the ways in which an author’s work comes to be understood as a corpus in the first place.