Ralph J. Damiano,
pioneers robotically assisted herat surgery
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Ralph J. Damiano, pioneers robotically assisted herat surgery |
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Campus Authors
Steven Meyer, Ph.D., associate professor of English in Arts & Sciences Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 2001) Literary giant Gertrude Stein and modern science are generally thought of as two separate entities.
Long before she became recognized as a literary icon, Stein spent 10 years conducting research in both the United States' leading psychological laboratory (housed in Harvard College) and the leading medical school (Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore). Meyer's book gives readers a glimpse at Stein's science background and shows how her scientific experiences laid the groundwork for her literary career. "The argument in a nutshell is that Stein's extraordinary self-consciousness and attention to what is going on when she herself writes is an area of investigation that is for all kinds of reasons generally ignored," Meyer said. "This physiological context challenges certain assumptions that dominate contemporary linguistics and literary theory, and I tried to argue she ends up offering extremely interesting insights into the way the body's neurophysiology functions in writing. "And in fact, her experimental writing really did involve experimentation, drawing on William James and certain literary figures as well as her early scientific investigations." Meyer first became interested in Stein while pursuing a doctorate at Yale University, which houses the Stein archive, including all of her manuscripts and thousands of letters. His dissertation focused on Stein's relationship to Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, but as Meyer says, "those were pretty obvious, not too much of a leap." A few years later, Meyer was reading several popular texts on contemporary science and noticed that in two different books about consciousness he kept making notes to himself about the relevance of Stein's writing to what was being discussed in the books. "It occurred to me that no one had done any interesting work on her experiments on neuroanatomy when she was at Johns Hopkins as a medical student," Meyer said. "So I wondered if it was a coincidence that she seemed to be thinking along lines that remain very suggestive for what these contemporary philosophers and scientists are thinking about, or was it something with her research and how that maybe played itself out in her writing, which no one has been able to get a particularly good handle on?" Five more years of research, background reading and extensive writing convinced Meyer that Stein's literary masterpieces were profoundly influenced by her scientific studies at both Harvard and Johns Hopkins. And now that he has had more time to think about it, Meyer has come up with a one-sentence description of the book that he says should have been included in the jacket notes. "Irresistible Dictation establishes the interdisciplinary contours of Stein's writing (philosophical, psychological, neurophysiological, literary)." Meyer's book is available at the Campus Bookstore. -- Andy Clendennen |
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