William H. Gass

I can't think of any other American writer as concerned (no, obsessed) with language as William H. Gass

I won't elaborate right now, but just listen - as an introduction to a philosopher/linguist/essayist/literary critic/novelist - to a few titles from his National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, essay collection (1996), Finding A Form, and tell me this writer is not right up this group's alley:

--"A Failing Grade for the Present Tense"
--"The Language of Being and Dying"
--"The Music of Prose"
--"The Book as a Container of Consciousness"

I will post more on this American treasure, William H. Gass, soon....

In the meantime, is anyone else familiar with his writing?

Or check out these mouth-watering linguistic titles from an earlier collection of Gass' essays compiled in The World Within the Word (1978):

--"Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence"
--"The Anatomy of Mind"
--"Food and Beast Language"
--"The Ontology of the Sentence, or How to Make a World of Words"

Could someone please please help me decide which one to read and report back my findings to the group?

Years ago I thought "The Pedersen Kid" and Omensetter's Luck were terrific, but by the time The Tunnel came out, I lacked the patience to finish it.

God, they all sound interesting!

I'm most interested in the Ontology of the Sentence. It would give us some more to chew on in the inflections and translation threads.

Are they very long 'reeeeque? Maybe instead of doing a group read of an entire book, we could group read short essays.

Na they're mostly in the 12 - 25 page range. I'll give a good gander to the Ontology of the Sentence this weekend and report back with some excerpts....

Great! Looking forward to hearing more about it!

It may take me some time to parse out exactly what Gass is communicating in Ontology of the Sentence - it's dense and extremely difficult - I may just excerpt instead, but in the meantime, here's a really cool interview with him (and look at his library - get out your magnifying glasses for some of the titles, all 20,000 of them!) that RSHabroptilus was kind enough to forward my way the other day:

http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n12/htdocs/william-h-gass-279.php

"But aren't we right to seek in language the imprint of reality? Doesn't it shape the syntax of our sentences? Surely the way we speak about the world is a response to it just as thoroughly as the world is a reflection of the way we speak? In a moment of uncustomary lucidity, Heidegger puts it this way:

Is the structure of a simple propositional statement (the combination of subject and predicate) the mirror image of the structure of the thing (of the union of substance with accidents)? Or could it be that even the structure of the thing as thus envisaged is a projection of the framework of the sentence?

What could be more obvious than that man transposes his propositional way of understanding things into the structure of the thing itself? Yet this view, seemingly critical yet actually rash and ill-considered, would have to explain first how such a transposition of propositional structure into the thing is supposed to be possible without the thing having already become visible. The question which comes first and functions as the standard, proposition structure or thing-structure, remains to this hour undecided. It remains doubtful whether in this form the question is at all decidable." ("The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language and Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter, p. 24).

But if we were making a world rather than trying to render one, wouldn't all of our questions be answered? Kennst du das Land where all such tricks are fair? where the very sense of transcendence which is made possible by ontological projection and equivocation and type-token confusion and reification and hidden contradiction and rhetorical sleight-of-hand, is appropriate and functional; where Being, if it is so willed, can stick to things like glue or sprout like hair; where certain epistemologies are not merely possible but true; where the affective life is like the sea, only the peaks of the waves can be counted; where space and time are palpable and stored in sacks like sand; a realm where acts are truly caused or truly free or truly fated, and where certain values are happily realized or tragically lost; where the ancient dream of the rationalist - that somewhere in language there is a blueprint or a map of reality (where Eeyore's meadow's marked, and Piglet's tree, as well as where the Woozle wasn't) - that dream remains a dream because now language is the land - in fiction - where every fact has to have the structure of the sentence which states it, value too, and quality, and apprehension, since there is no out-of-doors in the world where language is the land, no bird in bush or grocery store - just think - no sex or motion, jail or war - just think of that!"

Excerpted from "The Ontology of the Sentence" from The World within the Word.

Thought provoking stuff, Enrrrrique, thanks for sharing.

Surely the way we speak about the world is a response to it just as thoroughly as the world is a reflection of the way we speak?

Absolutely.