Before Gertrude Stein became the twentieth century's preeminent
experimental writer, she spent a decade conducting research in both
the leading psychological laboratory and the leading medical school
in the United States. This book unearths the turn-of-the-century
scientific and philosophical worlds in which the young Stein was
immersed, demonstrating how her extensive scientific training
continued to exert a profound influence on the development of her
extraordinary literary practices.
As an undergraduate, Stein worked with the philosopher William
James and the psychologist Hugo Munsterberg at the Harvard
Psychological Laboratory, investigating secondary personalities and
automatic writing. Later, at Johns Hopkins Medical School, she was
involved in cutting-edge neuroanatomical research in the laboratory
of Franklin Mall, the leading anatomist and embryologist of the
day, and his assistant Lewellys Barker, the author of the first
English-language textbook to describe the nervous system from the
standpoint of the newly established neuron doctrine. Just as
scientists reconceived relations among neurons as a function of
contact or contiguity, rather than of organic connection, Stein
radically reconceptualized language to place equal weight on the
conjunctive and disjunctive relations among words.
In the course of a broad reevaluation of Stein's career, the author
situates this major postromantic thinker in the lineage of
poet-scientists such as Wordsworth, Goethe, and Shelley, as well as
in an important line of speculative thinkers that extends from
Emerson to William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig
Wittgenstein, and emerges today in figures as disparate as the
bioaesthetician Suzanne Langer, the technoscience theorist Donna
Haraway, and the neuroscientists Francisco Varela, Gerald Edelman,
and J. Allan Hobson. These two lines share the perspective that
William James designated "radical empiricism."
A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, "Irresistible Dictation"
aims both to explicate Stein's radically experimental compositions
and to bring the radical empiricist philosophical tradition into
focus through the lens of her writing.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(1)
