Bernstein 143: "Stein's great discovery" (or "invention") is "'wordness'"
"satisfaction in language made present, contemporary; the pleasure/plentitude in the immersion in language, where language is not understood as a code for something else or a representation of somewhere else--a kind of eating or drinking or tasting, endowing an object status to language, [...] a revelation of the ordinary as sufficient unto itself, a revelation about the everyday things of life that make up a life, the activity of living, of speaking, and the fullness of every word"
Tender Buttons, of course, but also "the last section of The Making of Americans"
145: "In Stein's modernist composition, the meaning is not something seated behind the words, but something revealing itself in the words"