Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit

It is a well-known fact that Gertrude Stein participated in psychological experiments at Hugo Münsterberg’s psychological laboratory during her undergraduate studies at Harvard University in the 1890s. She also conducted such experiments, the results of which were published in the Psychological Review. In her autobiographical texts, Stein referred to the experiments and the articles. Biographical research on Stein never fails to mention the experiments, but treats them as proof of Stein’s early interest in character types, while a few scholars regard Stein’s texts as automatic writing and base their claim on the experiments. The essay contextualizes the experiments in the contemporaneous research on suggestion and the “doubling of the mind”. Rejecting the idea of automatic writing, I analyze the section “ROOMS” of Tender Buttons as a literary experiment with suggestion.