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 Münsterberg 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.
