Sense, science, and the interpretations of Gertrude Stein

Modernism - Modernity

Volumn 12, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 581-605

  Chodat, Robert ^a  

^a BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 43849100420     PISSN: 10716068     EISSN: 10806601     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2005.0108     Document Type: Review

References (39)

1. Paul Cézanne, "Une Conversation avec Cézanne," in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 12
2. Michael Gold, "Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot," in Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, ed. Michael J. Hoffman (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 76-8. Henceforth abbreviated CEGS
3. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl van Vechten (New York: Vintage, 1990), 198-9. Henceforth abbreviated ABT
4. Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age, transl. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chapter 6
5. Stein, Portraits and Prayers (New York: Random House, 1934), 21
6. Stein, Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Hass (Los Angeles, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), 30. Henceforth abbreviated PGU
7. The term "methodological solipsism" was coined by Hilary Putnam; see Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 220
8. Stein, Lectures in America (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co., 1957), 174-5. Henceforth abbreviated LA
9. Claudia Franken, Gertrude Stein, Writer and Thinker (Munich: Lit Verlag, 2000), 74
10. Stein, Picasso, transl. Alice B. Toklas (London: Batsford, 1948), 35
11. Quotes are taken from the following texts, respectively: Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 38-9
12. and Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 92, 105. The latter henceforth abbreviated WL
13. Steven Meyer, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 11. Henceforth abbreviated ID
14. Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (1937; Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993), 251
15. On the ambiguity of "experience" (Erlebnis) as it developed at the end of the nineteenth century, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, second edition, transl. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2000), 64 ff
16. William James, "Percept and Concept," in Writings 1902-1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1008
17. On James's introspection in light of later developments, see William Lyons, The Disappearance of Introspection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986)
18. Cf. Owen Flanagan, The Science of the Mind, second edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 31
19. On the rise of nineteenth-century biology and the challenge it presented to seventeenth-century physics, see Ernst Meyer, The Rise of Biological Thinking: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). I say "among others" here because the appeal of biology was felt among many other turn-of-the-century thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Henri Bergson
20. Bjorn Ramberg, "Post-Ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty Versus Davidson," in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 366
21. On rationality as internal coherence, see Bjorn Ramberg, "Naturalizing Idealizations: Pragmatism and the Interpretivist Strategy," http://folk.uio.no.bjoerntr/Natideal.hmtl; Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), especially chapter 4
22. Donald Davidson, Subjective, Objective, Intersubjective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
23. On Freud's confusion of reasons and causes, see Marcia Cavell, The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)
24. Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud, transl. Carol Cosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)
25. Iris Murdoch, "The Idea of Perfection," in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1997), 326
26. This description is taken from Dennett's Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Bradford, 1978), 153
27. Kenneth Burke, "The Impartial Essence," in CEGS, 74
28. Burke, "Impartial Essence," 75
29. Davidson, "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," in Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore (Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1986), 433-46
30. On Stein's "ordinary" diction, see, for example, Richard Kostalenetz, "Introduction," in The Yale Gertrude Stein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, c1980), xiii
31. This strategy was of course most famously described by Joseph Frank in his 1945 essay "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," reprinted in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 3-62
32. One could locate the loss of sense at still lower levels, such as within (what seem to be) words themselves. The most famous literary instance of this phenomenon is Finnegans Wake, and among the most famous philosophical cases is W. V. Quine's account of the native who utters "gavagai." See his Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), chapter 2
33. Burke, "Engineering With Words," in CEGS, 42
34. Donald Sutherland, "Gertrude Stein and the Twentieth Century," in PGU, 139-54
35. Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), xvi
36. Steiner, Exact Resemblance, especially chapter 2
37. William Gass, "Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence," in The World within the Word (New York: Knopf, 1978), 90
38. Richard Poirier, "Gertrude Stein: 'Manly Agitations,'" in Trying It Out in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), 183-202
39. Lisa Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press, 1990), 4