Tender Buttons

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Tender Buttons is a 1914 book by American writer Gertrude Stein consisting of three sections titled "Objects", "Food", and "Rooms". While the short book consists of multiple poems covering the everyday mundane, Stein's experimental use of language renders the poems unorthodox and their subjects unfamiliar.

Stein began composition of the book in 1912 with multiple short prose poems in an effort to "create a word relationship between the word and the things seen" using a "realist" perspective. She then published it in three sections as her second book in 1914.

Tender Buttons has provoked divided critical responses since its publication. It is renowned for its Modernist approach to portraying the everyday object and has been lauded as a "masterpiece of verbal Cubism". Its first poem, "A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass", is arguably its most famous, and is often cited as one of the quintessential works of Cubist literature.

The book has also been, however, criticized as "a modernist triumph, a spectacular failure, a collection of confusing gibberish, and an intentional hoax".

Like Stein's syntax of poems in the book, the title juxtaposes two familiar concepts to alienate their familiar meanings. Rather than use an expected collocate, Stein frequently associates two familiar but independent ideas in order to challenge their established authenticity. Many of the titles of the individual poems likewise use similar juxtapositions: "Glazed Glitter", "A Piece of Coffee", etc.

While the word "tender" and the word "buttons" are two ordinary words in the sense that they both have familiar meanings to the average reader, their displacement from a usual context and their subsequent synthesis ruptures a usual understanding of their meanings and implications.

By displacing these words into an unfamiliar context, Stein challenges the reader's notion of what these words actually mean. In establishing the phrase, "tender buttons", as the title of the series, Stein defines her series of poems to be both familiar and foreign in their context.

The title of Tender Buttons can likewise be interpreted to suggest a singular, static moment of time that is free of the implications of space. The title, like the poems, exists in a space that is independent of the implications of a certain time, and in this sense, is one reason for the collection's timelessness.

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About the Author: Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 - July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector. Born in the Allegheny West neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures in modernism in literature and art would meet, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Henri Matisse.

In 1933, Stein published a kind of memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde.

The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of cult literary figure into mainstream attention. Two quotes from her works have become widely known: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" and "there is no there there", with the latter often taken to be a reference to her childhood home of Oakland, California.

Her books include Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum) (1903), about a lesbian romantic affair involving several of Stein's female friends; Fernhurst, a fictional story about a romantic affair; Three Lives (1905-06); The Making of Americans (1902-1911) and Tender Buttons. In the latter work, Stein comments on lesbian sexuality.

Her activities during World War II have been the subject of analysis and commentary. As a Jew living in Nazi-occupied France, Stein may have been able to save her life and sustain her lifestyle as an art collector through the protection of powerful Vichy government official Bernard Faÿ. Stein continued to praise Vichy leader Marshall Pétain after the war ended, at a time when Pétain had been sentenced to death by a French court for treason. Others have argued that some of the accounts of Stein's wartime activities have amounted to a "witch hunt".