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For laura riding, no one embodies “the new barbarism” more than Gertrude Stein: “No one but Miss Stein has been willing to be as ordinary as simple, as primitive, as stupid, as barbaric as successful barbarism demands.” The charge, which echoes T. S. Eliot's, attests to the efficacy with which Stein disturbs the boundaries of civilization to represent the process of acculturation during which Americans are made. Ironically, however, Riding's “barbarism” names precisely what Stein sought to depict, “gross dogmatic conventions resulting from the fear-inspired consolidation of humanity[,]. … a consolidation against the terror of numbers, each unknown, which would reign if humanity were not consolidated as humanity” (p. 135). Barbarism inheres in the civilizing process, in the very conventions that designate alterity, and it is in that sense that it is, unexpectedly, “ordinary.” |
