There There Context Links

After reading There There and reviewing the three context links, I found that the article about Gertrude Stein was pretty interesting to me.  Gertrude Stein is from Oakland, and she grew up there, but she moved to Baltimore around the age of seventeen.  Forty-five years later, she returned to Oakland, and she was shocked at how much the city of Oakland had changed.  Her home that she grew up in was no longer there, and the land was completely different.  The city of Oakland had become urbanized, and the population grew from 35,000 in 1880 to 300,000 by the time Gertrude Stein returned in 1935.  The pastoral land of Oakland in 1880 was changed as more houses were built on it.  Gertrude Stein is famous for the quote, "there is no there there."  This quote is directly related to how Oakland changed and urbanized and was no longer what it once was.  Some people misunderstand this quote by thinking that it is supposed to condemn the city of Oakland, but it is actually just a quote that shows the "painful nostalgia" of the now changed land.  I also learned that there is even a statue that says "there" at the border of Oakland and Berkeley.  Learning about Gertrude Stein and her famous quote adds to my understanding of the novel of There There because this quote was mentioned in Dene's chapter of the novel.  Dene had an understanding of the quote while Rob misunderstood it.  The article gives me a deeper understanding of who the person who said this quote was and how she came up with it.