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Scratching the Surface: Tender Buttons and the Textures of Modernism

Abstract:The modernist poem, despite—or perhaps because of—its celebrated fragments, ruins, and other surface discontinuities, has both figured itself and been figured as a continuous, hard, transparent texture, one that suppresses the role of touch at work in its making and reception, favoring instead a mode of engagement modeled on visual perception. Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons provides a radical alternative to such hard, masculinized modernist surfaces and our habits of engaging them by accentuating, rather than effacing, the perception of texture. Against the longstanding tendency among Stein's readers to privilege sight's role in Tender Buttons and her aesthetics more broadly, this essay attends to touch and texture in Stein's text. Stein's foregrounding of touch as mode of inquiry reorients our encounters with the modernist object, fostering queer (strange, improper, undecided) moments of tactile and affective feeling that attach to and exceed everyday objects, including poetic objects like Tender Buttons.