| dc.description.abstract | My thesis will focus on how Gertrude Stein’s poem, “Lifting Belly,” releases
three distinctive sensations of visuality, sound, and touch to involve readers and reveals
lesbian meanings in the poetic context. I will propose a new reading perspective to
interpret Stein’s “Lifting Belly”—that is, to understand the poetic content from first
exploring the functions of the pronouns in banal linguistic forms that we always
overlook. Many Stein critics have a tendency to only emphasize how this phrase, “lifting
belly,” produces lesbian meanings in this poem. However, the pronouns are actually
worth of our careful scrutiny because their identification with this phrase can direct us to
track down various and shifting meanings for this phrase in a gradual process. Hence, in
my thesis I will call this phrase as a polyvalent LB signifier. With both the pronouns I
bring into my discussion and repeated LB signifiers, I will secondly explain how both
them are appropriated by Stein to produce lesbian meanings within three operative
mechanisms—the visual patterning system of coordination, the performative mechanism
of “general iterability” (Culler 100), and the aural mechanism of dialogue—structured in
this poem. Along with the process of my investigation, lesbian elements will be revealed
sequentially to suggest Stein’s preference in privileging female gendering for both the
used pronouns and LB signifiers and her political purpose to present a lesbian world in
this poem, “Lifting Belly.” Finally, I will display how three diverse sensations of
visuality, sound, and touch are released along with the lesbian elements that are signified
in these three mechanisms. While lesbian sensations provoke readers into a perceptible
and emotional engagement into this poem, readers are drawn to believe in the lesbian
world constituted by all the lesbian elements. | en_US |