Reading Gertrude Stein with My Mother

Abstract: "Reading Gertrude Stein with My Mother" is a braided essay about relearning how to communicate with my mother after the anomia that developed from her stroke and how modernist scholars approach the syntactical difficulties of Gertrude Stein's high modernist aesthetics. This essay is not so much an interpretation of a text as it is an interrogation of what is gained and lost when we choose to interpret or to equate interpretation with the creations of meaning, especially in the context of speech disabilities. I ask, under what circumstances do we choose to interpret language that is difficult to understand, and when do we find alternative ways to create meaning (and what might those be)?