Acknowledgments ix Introduction: "Announce what you see" 1 1 Talking and Listening in Stein's Early Life and Works 15 "Interested in the mere workings of the machinery" The Potential Remaking of Americans, or Revising America Sound Writing A Sensible Education 2 Modifying the Mind: William James and Tender Buttons 36 Tender Buttons Disturb a Center: Questioning Our Rhetorical Religion 3 Conversational Relations in Geography and Plays 57 Recognizing the Real in a Collage of Words and Phrases Food and Talk The Motivations behind What Happened What Can Happen When People Talk and Read Conversation Patterning as the Essence of What Happens Some Discoveries: Subtle Antagonism, or Free Play in Language Repairing Friendship in "Susie Asado" One-sided Conversations with Shakespeare, or Tricked by Talk 4 Talk in the Thirties: In the Present, with the Past 89 Starting Conversations in America What They Might Have Talked About Stein and Einstein The Closed American Mind Writing and Speaking in Stein's Quirky Defining Learning about Listening through Reading Borrow and Smollett Stein's Reading and Writing of "Rights" and "Rites" 5 Talking Boundaries into Thresholds in Ida 119 "Who is any one said the wife to the husband" Fame and the Public: Alienation from the Self The Self and Its Trappings Stein at Night Means Delight Standing in the Window Also Known As, or The Metaphor of Sight The Death of Conversation, or The Monologue of Death Human Intertextuality 6 Expressing a State of Mind: Conversation, Politics and Individuality in Mrs. Reynolds and Brewsie and Willie 149 Talking under an Angel Harper Cloud "A queer state of living," or Resistance through Reticulation and Local Area Networks Getting Together and Thinking in Brewsie and Willie Yes-and-No "Job-men" Stein "ain't so phony as she sounds" Real Ideas Conclusions: Feminine Endings 193 "The Woman Who Changed the Mind of a Nation" Sublime Amalgamations Notes 205 Bibliography 235 Index 251.