On Gertrude Stein's style

"The circular repetitive style of Gertrude Stein's Melanctha expresses her interest in the dilution of immediate awareness by memory and anticipation, what she calls 'association,' which is obscured in language by the system of the tenses. Stein's insistence on the presentness of experience is identical with her decision to keep the present tense, to choose commonplace short words and repeat groups of them incessantly, to use an extremely loose syntax and abjure most punctuation. Every style is a means of insisting on something."

from Against Interpretation p.35