THE SCIENCE OF SUPERSTITION: GERTRUDE STEIN, WILLIAM JAMES, AND THE FORMATION OF BELIEF

Despite Gertrude Stein's disclaimers, references to superstitions and prophecies abound her works, a curiosity that has been mostly ignored in Stein's oeuvre. By examining Stein's use of superstitions as the basis of her narrative experimentation, Hawkins proposes that people understand Stein's narrative circuitousness as her attempt to develop a highly refined science in which she aims in her writing to chart the moment of knowing. Strikingly, William James describes this same moment of knowing in his most antiscientific treatise, "The Confidences of a Psychical Researcher." By reading Stein and James through the lens of belief, Hawkins further hopes to revise how people understand modernism's complex incorporation and interrogation of the empiricist terms of nineteenth-century literature.