Abstract

In 1934 Gertrude Stein returned to the United States, for the first time in thirty years, to give her Lectures in America. Approaching the delivery of her lectures within their historical context, mediating communicative shifts from the nineteenth-century novel to twentieth-century publicity, and accounting for distinctions between speaking and writing, Stein used public relations strategies to capitalize on her celebrity and to introduce audiences to her modernist compositional processes. The lecture tour became an occasion for engaging the public relations culture that dictated the terms of her image's circulation and for retheorizing delivery in an age of publicity.