Reaction (Julie)

Depending on the choice of a particular style of writing, the same elements can be gained or lost, such as the understanding of a text or a poem. For example I quote Stevens and James on the same idea of experiencing life: "One likes to practice the thing" (Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu) and "I live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions grow more true" (The Will to Believe). Stevens' line is concise with the main idea, while James can develop more the idea by explaining it. That is a difference between poetry and a lecture.


A second element is the seduction effect that we talked so much about. At first sight, a poem can appear more seductive than a lecture. But it is not necessarily the case, and sometimes a long sentence or a short paragraph that readers easily understand can seduce more than a line or a verse that is not clear at all. Think James and Stein for example.


A third element which can be gained or lost is the fact of making readers think about an idea or a question. For instance I think that people will reflect more upon Stein's poetry to try to get a meaning of it, than upon James' lectures.


The choice of a particular style of writing is therefore a key element in catching readers' interest. Depending on people, they will be more attracted by a lecture than a poem, or the opposite, even though the idea expressed is the same. Think of the example I gave about Stevens and James.


The choice of a particular style of writing can provoke strong feelings. For example with Stein' s writings or poems. I quote Composition as Explanation: "And after that what changes what changes after that, after that what changes and what changes after that and after that and what changes and after that and what changes after that" (519). After reading such a sentence, it is either you love it and you want to read more or you hate it and you want to throw the book out of the window because it drives you crazy. But at least you have a reaction. And I think that is the point she wants to make: reaction to what you are reading. Nonetheless, such a style of writing can foreclose possibilities of expressing meaning, as well as to keep readers' attention. And it is a shame.

Lines, forms

I forgot about this.

The first thing I want is a definition of style. Style is the words rubbing together. I do not know how this rub works, how one winds the feeling about the words; some of it must have been made by the past, by all the reader’s readings, by everything she has heard, murmuring, murmuring; but it feels intuitive too, something throaty and warm and strung from the navel. It must be built out of experience; words are built out of experience; it feels remarkable, then, this net through which every word must be sifted must be an intricacy of interweaving, but it has been so densely done it feels like one’s own strings.

I like those writers who can move in and out of styles. I am a cynic by instinct, and do not like that which tastes too strongly of belief in one thing, in one feeling, one thought. These things pass. To be human is have many voices, to be open to being a multitude. Belief can close you in. Style can shut you up, darken the sight. Thus I love irony. But I do not, of course, believe in it. It is not the final style. Belief is beautiful.

How does a writer’s style open or foreclose possibilities of expressing meaning? What does this mean? to express, to press, down and in. One pulls it out, draws it slowly out of the stomach, leaves it, and it sits. Another picks it up, opens it, draws from it. Three things.

Lately I’ve been interested in books with writings and drawings and images collected together. Drawings and images give the eye forms and lines different from the usual 26. Those twentysix they make you weary. Different forms and lines freshen and inspirit letters. They make a writing cleaner, stronger. I like things that are clean and strong.

We give the world its forms. I like forms, lines, the feeling of moving along the curve of a thing. I would have as many lines as I could.

Stein and James: The Same Coin

“If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest.”

This is a short passage from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. If you read this and didn’t scratch your head at all you either understand the giant intellectual buffet that is the poet’s mind or are mentally unsound. With Gertrude, its often easy to be uncertain which applies to you. Stein’s writing appears to be randomized and pure gibberish, but – to paraphrase Hamlet – there is method to her madness, or at least that’s what she told us. Stein is exploring the language gap between words and objects. By exploring this gap, she shows the sort of limitations our language has. We can not adequately express a rose because of all the connotations a rose may have for every individual who sees it. I see a rose, I may also see other flowers or gardening equipment or clichéd expressions of love. Gertrude Stein may see a gate.

The problem with Gertrude’s expression of this idea, language and limits and how to break through them, is that the lack of convention makes it difficult to understand. The leaps and jumps she makes may make sense for her, but they won’t make sense to everyone (or even anyone?). This is where I feel it is best to let William James pick up the slack. Because James is a natural lecturer and speaks in the very clear terms that Stein does not, he can explain away Stein’s seeming insanity. For example, in his lecture “The Stream of Consciousness”, James explains that “[t]he entire history of what is called Sensation is a commentary on our inability to tell whether two sensible qualities received apart are exactly alike.” James can give reasonable explanations, easier for our minds to follow, that Stein can’t.

James and Stein are complimentary. Stein is the poetic, the chaotic, while James is the scientific, the order. They are both dealing with the same subject, but each on their own terms. Two sides of the same coin if you will. Each accomplishes something the other can’t. James can’t adequately show the examples he talks about but he can explain them. Stein can’t explain what her writing is without breaking the form, but she can use that form for all she’s worth.

Chloroform, Melatonin, Lectures and Other Things that Put Me to Sleep (Leah)

Lectures are a strange form of text. They possess a strange power. They can be a powerful sleep aid or an agent in instilling passion in a subject. James charms us with his lectures, even without seeing him present them. What James can’t do is put the concepts of his lectures into practice through the form of his text. The lectures are primarily an informational vehicle; a text to educate. While some wordplay is possible, lectures don’t have the flexibility of, say, poetry.

Gertrude Stein’s work embodies meaning. The form of her writing creates meaning instead of merely conveying information. Stein illustrates the gaps in language in her works. While James can tell us that there is “only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as someone calls them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages as well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects” Stein can actually make her audience feel the space between the tangible “nature” and the “conceptual shorthand” (100). How little words actually mean. Stein’s work can also show how the form of a literary work can create meaning. Take this excerpt from A Circular Play:

One does not run around in a circle to make a circular play.
Do not run around in a circle and make a circular play.
It is not necessary to run around in a circle to get ready to write a circular play (148).

You can see that the writing is “cycling” to use an improve term. It is going around in a circle and leading to no new information. It is ineffective just as it says running around in a circle would be.
Stein also has more freedom in poetry to play with the way people perceive the written word. James can tell us that “consciousness is constant change” (SoC), but Stein models it, by the repetition of the same words, or phrases in her poetry, by words with similar meanings or sounds. We are different every time we read the word. Time has passed, we have changed, the word has more meaning, and Stein shows us this through action. To look at an example of this repletion see the first two sentences of “A RED HAT.” from the collection Tender Buttons: “A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous ordinarily, it is so monstrous because there is no red in it. If red is in everything it is not necessary” (252).

How to See Clear through Our Ideas (Kevin)

I find the topic of this prompt quite difficult to respond to; if I am to respect the essential caveat of the proposition to limit my inquiry into style to the notion that the chosen method of artistic grace is a voluntary act on behalf of the author. The only way for me to reply to this prompt is to explain why I cannot. To think that Stein could write Stevens, or Plato, Peirce, is unimaginable, for an author has as little choice over the idiosyncratic nature of her style as she does in the selection of her parents. In holding that a particular style may be brought off through careful attention to its technique, we are essentially saying that Stein could have written like Stevens, or that Plato could have written like Peirce, if they had been so inclined. The vital motivation that the individual discovers in responding to the historical needs of her epoch as they confront her specifically is too bound up in technique for there to be any question of an author writing in a different style than her own. For example, James was a scientifically minded thinker with a religious temperament. In his writings he sought to provide justification for the possibilities of religious experience in a time when philosophy was infused with materialism by appealing to the “cash-value” benefits believers stood to gain by entertaining the religious hypothesis; and on a more personal level, James’s work may be viewed as a resolution to articulate a plan of action to conquer his own soul-sickness. C.S. Peirce was a conflicted individual who seemed to believe that human beings must become confident in their pursuit of objective truth by pursuing it collectively via the rigorous principles of clear-headed scientific investigation. He wrote at a time when the rationalism of Hegel threatened empirical investigation in science with highfalutin abstractions that neglected to verify theories through experimentation. Wallace Stevens wrote wildly imaginative and exotic poetry—almost Romantic in the emphasis he places on the sublime and the power of the human imagination—at a time when the pursuit of truth through the practices of organized religion was no longer a “live” hypothesis for people following the catastrophes of the World Wars in the first part of the twentieth century. Similarly, Gertrude Stein responded to the oppressive restrictions in early twentieth century society that prevented her from publicly expressing her love for another woman. The disjointed structure through we she relayed her abstruse and codified language exposes the arbitrary power society with which society imbues its language and utilizes it as a tool to enforce its prejudices. And Plato, he found certainty by striking the via media between the philosophy of his predecessors Parmenides and Heraclitus. In his book Irrational Man, William Barrett describes the how personal urgencies of Plato’s life manifest themselves in his philosophy:
As a young man, we are told, Plato had studied the doctrines of Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus who had taught that all things were in flux and that there was no escape anywhere from death and change; the young Plato, tormented by this vision, desired at all costs a refuge in the eternal fro the insecurities and ravages of time. Hence the enormous attraction for him of the science of mathematics, which opens up a realm of eternal truths…Hence too the tremendous emotional force for him of the theory of eternal forms or Ideas, since these latter were an everlasting realm to which man has access.

In order to ask what possibilities are opened or foreclosed by an author’s choice of a particular style, it may be instructive to remember Miguel De Unamuno’s assertion that all philosophy is nothing more than a justification for our conduct and beliefs after the fact. We may also quote one of Nietzsche’s more famous maxims: “Every great philosophy so far has been the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.” In this way, there is no distance in style, only difference. In pragmatic terms, we might say that a writer’s style is nothing more than the vehicle through which she “harmonizes” the conflicts reality continually presents to her with the stock of beliefs that give her the confidence and strength to navigate through the universe. On this point James writes:
Any idea that helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesn’t entangle our progress in frustrations, that fits, in fact, and adapts our life to reality’s whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement.

If Peirce cannot write poetry, it is because the medium does not lend itself to achieving the goals of logical analysis that are the methods through which he understands reality and the projects through which he articulates it. If Stein does not write like Plato, it is because the hypothesis of “The Good” is not live for her, so pursuing a dialectic that sets out to reveal this truth is not only impractical but impossible because it lacks the vital necessity that the pragmatists hold as an indispensable aspect of all our truths. In Pierce’s terms: there is no irritation of doubt to stimulate a struggle inquiry to attain belief in a truth that is not live.
I suppose the point I am trying to convey here is that style is not an intellectual or aesthetic preference. It is the handmaid to the urgent needs of the individual at those times in our lives when artistic creation serves as defense against the “swarming continuum” of reality that threatens to overwhelm us when we are confronted with ontological shock. James writes in “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth”: “It is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy.” Indeed, but it is important to remember that imagination is never independent of the reality that serves as its inspiration.

In order to effectively comment on a particular style of writing, it is important to understand the format being utilized by the writer. For instance, In Plato's Symposium there are several different points of view being communicated through the speakers. This adds another tier of complexity to the work because we also know that Plato is trying to use these diverse views in order to show us his own unique view on love without directly telling the audience. This indirect way of communicating can be utilized in poetry as well. Many authors utilize abstract metaphors in order to create an image that aids the reader in understanding the author's overall idea. This can be done in a variety of ways, such as appealing to sensory images and emotional states. In order to comment on a piece of abstract writing, the reader must fully understand the subtle use of language being utilized and be able to successfully translate the images being used into a form that is easily communicated to others. Philosophical essays, as opposed to indirect literary styles, are meant to clearly demonstrate a point in a straight forward manner. This style of writing is meant to take an abstract concept and make it easy to understand.

Form of Writing and School of Thought

-I do not think any of them differ. You look at the essay, the poem and the Symposium much like you do any other piece of work. You look at the basic content provided, then you take it a step further if needed and try to interpret it for deeper meanings. Then once that is done, you must analyze it based on that interpretation. So the only thing that seems to differ is the content by which those works are based on. When interpreting philosophy, you remove the core belief it is founded on and then compare it to other philosophical works that incorporate those same ideas. I have a limited understanding of poetry, so I cannot speak on its behalf in a deep sense. But it seems as though people interpret poetry based on the individual poet, not the idea. So the poem being interpreted would be compared to other poetry by that poet and the period in his life in which he or she wrote it.