Stein Stein Stein

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. NY:Vintage, 1990.

This may remain the ultimate history of the Lost Generation rive gauche avant garde in Paris around WWI and through the 1920's. I'm tempted to pluck a bouquet of bons mots and tidbits about favorite artists and authors, but surely that's been done elsewhere.

The book could give gossip a good name.

Otherly, this is probably the most accessible extant example of Stein sentences, a matter worth study. It's also a useful though limited revelation of Stein's intentions in her other well known works, The Making of Americans, 3 Lives, Stanzas in Meditation, Tender Buttons, and Geography and Plays. This contains as extensive and accessible set of reflections as any I've seen by Stein on her relationship with publishing and the general difficulties of the public with most of her work.

"[Stein] says that listening to the rhythmn of [Basket the poodle's] water drinking made her recognize the difference beween sentences and paragrpahs, that paragraphs are emotional and that sentences are not" (248).

This is deliberately provocative, impossible in the literal, and worthy of study.

"Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality. She has produced a simplification by this concentration, and as a result, the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should not be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry and prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry or prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or an inner reality" (211).

One might ask how anything without emotion might render either an inner or an outer reality. But Stein's intentions might (I can only surmise) be approached by pulling apart the distinctions between incidental sentiments that relate to an author's circumstantial relationship to historical events, and the passion involved in a recognition of the ubiquity of such relationships, and the music or dance of their so relating.

In my long experience as a thoroughly failed author and poet, one way that one may thoroughly fail is by mistaking one's emotion for the readers' emotions, one's relation to the text for the readers' relation to the text.

I feel certain that this is what T.S. Eliot, for example, tried to get at with his theory of the objective correlative. Yet I have still nowhere seen this expressed in a way that satisfies me, and it strikes me as perfectly reasonable that one baffles students in trying to express it. The thing is that what's intended by this POV and what's intended by the Romantic and Post-Romantic insistence that the acme of art is the expression of the author's inner emotion are not contradictory, and yet the words in which these things get couched most definitely are.

I think that the refinement needed to resolve this falls along these lines Yes, the writer's relationship to Universe or common concern resembles the readers' almost exactly; however, it differs in matters of the specific case. And the writers' POV of these matters, filtered through the readers' POV does not equal the readers' POV itself.

To avoid the distortion in this, the author cannot simply gush forth emotion. What results inevitably contains the emotion, the objects that provoked the emotion in their temporal array -- the history, in other words. Expunging these may provide relief to the writer; they don't provide this as well to the reader, who has experienced another history. However, that business of relationship is experienced by both parties. That retains public value. And it's not so much that having to hear personal details dilutes that value; we're happy enough to hear personal details properly framed. It's that changing the music or the structure to match the incidentals of one's own experience of Event distorts the experience of relationships otherwise offered.

Otherwise, the more emotion involved the better, and we shall call it passion instead of sentiment. As Louis-Ferdinand Celine quotes the biologist Savy, "Everything is emotion." I should think these poles are equally true.

It was at that time [of travelling in Granada] that Gertrude Stein's style gradually changed. She says hitherto she had been interested only in the insides of people, their chracter and what went on inside them, it was during that summer that she firstfelt a desre to express the rhythm o fthe visible world" (119).

For this kind of writing, see particularly Stanzas in Meditation, from Sun and Moon, as well as Tender Buttons.
Here's a passage I will have to read Picabia to judge:

"Picabia had conceived and is struggling with the problem that a line should have the vibration of a musical sound and that this vibration should be teh result of conceiving the human form and the human fac in so tenuous a fashion that it would induce such vibration in the line forming it. It is his way of achieving the disembodied" (210).

This should be compared to Olson in "Projective Verse."

Ach, no end to Stein. But I will have more opportunities with The Making of Americans shortly.

Paragraphs

Another observation about paragraphs -

The mind must recurse through the iteration of a paragraph in the same or almost the same way that it does in a sentence. So the rhythm of a paragraph must vary in ways fairly analogous to the rhythms of a sentence. Therefore modes of reference and of modification must be similar in a paragraph to those in a sentence.

Those in sentences have been fairly thoroughly mapped; it remains to correspond them.

In a sentence, using something like the Minimalist model insofar as I understand it, There's a head. Against the head one may also have a gaggle of modifiers.

The head operates something like the scene-setting shot in film editing. That's often called "the long shot" or something like that -- I should go to a film person for this. Actually, I'll need an editor used to working with visuals as Murch is used to working with sound, ideally.

So, given the long shot, we know that the rest contextualizes in this scene, and we use the characteristics of the scene to fill in information, and we use the added details to flesh out the scene.

We have some natural conflict in that the head must delimit in some way, and because the details must add, amend, change. A "closed" story (closed per Bernstein) is one that changes little the initial shot, essentially adding to it or embellishing it rather than "actively" destroying its assumptions and revising them.

Think Apollo and Dionysus here, as in Nietszche's reading.

It strikes me that the issue for me, the issue of incomprehensibility in my writing, is that my readers generally want to insist that there be a long shot to b
egin with, a setting shot.

OF course, that tends to be a thesis or a declarative sentence. And that tends to establish limits I do not want. However, it seems there should be some way to counterfeit this, or to give them something that satisfies their will for a context-establishing shot without making the whole more closed or didactic.

What I need to do is classify and qualify types of opening shots in opening paragraphs, and see how this is done and who is more and less didactic, and what qualities establish scene.

Of course, it won't work exactly by Ph.

Also -- 2 principles that must be relevant:
1) In sentences, items of the Head are identified either by being labelled, or by position in the sentence (that position being designated by the pauses and musical qualities of speech, or by punctation. Therefore something similar will apply in Ph's. Now, the thing I must compare with is almost certainly not verb changes, but declension and terminations of nouns, subject and object, since the verbs are not ID'd as subject or object by their terminations --- although maybe, maybe the terminations can determine which they apply to, though it does not seem so in English.
Check in this context also inversions. Why does Milton still make sense when he inverts?
2) In sentences and paragraphs, listeners and readers clearly play accepted structural elements that may be ID'd and analyzed against presumptions of intention derived from content, reference, and social circumstance. All the latter would seem to be more significant the farther one gets from sentence.

So there are two opportunities to designate that do not need sequence of the unit designated -- though they may need sequence otherwise, within the unit or of larger units of the level in which the unit in question is contained.

NOW, then, a possible Key to Hypertext might be contained in the way of making a phrase or unit function naturally as a scene-setting shot without allowing it to function as a definer or delimiter ---

though this seems as though there may be some contradiction inherent. I need to go more precisely into the nature of this delimitation as opposed (?) to its suggestivity.

Another observation --- Establishing the HEAD in the sentence clearly DOES = or ~ establishing the scene or noun or topic in the ph.

I have to wonder whether another trip through Pedro Paramo is requisite.

Offhand, I think the following are necessary:

1. Joyce in Ulysses, Wake, and Artist
2. Beckett at the end.
3. Rulfo in Paramo and in a couple stories, including El Hombre.
4. Hemingway.
5. A couple people I am less happy with. Updike and Bellow, perhaps.
6. Breton
7. Rimbaud. vs Baudelaire and Ponge?
8. Wharton
9. Woolf
10. Mary Shelley
11. John Milton

Some poets. Whitman, Eliot, Celan, Pound, Williams. Sonnets -- perhaps Shakespeare.

I'm not sure it will work usefully with plays, in which so much will be unspoken -- the orientation provided by the mise en scene.

======

Paragraphing -- further notes

Language

I need to describe it musically, syntactically, punctuationally, visually, possibly referentially. The major problem is that the phrases distinguished will not nest properly. As such, I need internal and external tags to designate differences in the same qualities, as differentiated at different phrasal levels and syntactic levels.

Roman Jakobson Two Aspects of Language

Jakobson's 6 factors of language:

  CONTEXT
ADDRESSER MESSAGE  ADDRESSEE
  CONTACT
   CODE

He describes them like so:

The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to (the 'referent' in another, somewhat ambiguous nomenclature), graspable by the ADDRESSEE, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and ADDRESSEE (or in other words, to the encoder and decorder of the message); and, finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection between the ADDRESSER and the ADDRESSEE, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication (1260-1261).

Each verbal message includes all of these, but there may be difference of "hierarchical order" of functions -- which does not mean temporal order. J goes on to differentiate a new logical dimension of functions.

• Referential -- denotative, cognitive


• Emotive -- expressive


• Conative -- Orientation toward the addressee , vocative, imperative,


• Phatic -- like fingering online. To get a response to see if one's there.


• Metalingual -- glossing, about the lexical code.


• Poetic -- message itself (!?)

To continue ----

"The poetic function is not the sole functin of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, wheras in all otehr verbval activities it acts as a subsideariy, accessory constitutent" (1264).

: cola: Sections of a sentence or rhythmical period (plural of colon).

"What is the indespensible feature inherent in any piece of poetry? To answer this question we must recall the two basic modes of arrangement used in verbal behavior, selction and combination. If 'child' is the topic, of the message, the speakers selects one among the extant, more or less similar nouns like child, kid, youngster, tot, all fo them equivalent in a certan respect, and them, to comment on this topic, he may select one of the semanticaly cognate vebs, sleeps, dozes, nods, naps. Both chosen words combine in the speech chain. The selection is produced on teh basis of equvalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymy and antonymy, while the combination, the build-up of he sequence, si based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the consititutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is wqualized with any other syllable of the same sequence; word stress is assumed to equal word stress, as unstress equals unstress; prosodic long is matched with long, and short with short; word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equals no boundary; syntacti pause equals syntactic puase, no pause equals no pause. Syllables are converted into untits o measure, and so are morae or stresses.

It may be objected that metalanguage also makes a sequential use of equivalent units when combining synonymic expressions into an equational sentnece: A = A (Mare is the female of the horse). Poetry and metalonguage, however, are in diamtericla opposition to each other: in metalanguage theseqence is used to build an equation, whereas i poetry the equation is used to build a sequence. (1265).

This was all part of a summation Jakobson wrote in 1960, for Sebeok's journal.

Jakobson also divided speech acts into "verbal levels" morphemic, lexical, syntactic, and phraseological -- commenting that in these "either of these two relations (similarity and contiguity [metaphor or metonymy, he otherwise puts it]) can appear" (1266).

So that makes for another logical dimension to J's analysis. By his construction, we make more or less symmetrical recursive analyses based on factors including said contiguity or similarities happening at various segment-units of grammatical construction such as a poet might label morpheme | word | phrase | line | stanza | canto. I'm interested that J uses pretty much the same divisions I used for my analysis of complexity with John Heywood a couple of years back. A correspondence with Chomsky's branching constructions can also be drawn. Chomsky draws the recursions as moving from smaller constructions outward, which seems correct except that a running contextual factor is maintained, what Iser calls a "background" (Iser, Wolfgang. "Interaction Between Text and Reader." Norton THEORY AND CRITICISM.)

Jakobson's response to graphic art reveals something about his metonymic and metaphoric.

. . . the manifestly metonymical orientation of Cubism, where the object is transfomed into a set of synecdoches; the Surrealist painters responded with a patently metaphorical attitude. Ever since the productions of D.W. Griffith, the art of cinema, with its highly developed capacityfor changing the angle, the perspective, and focus of shots, has broken with the tradition of the theater and ranged an unprecedented variety of synechdochic close-ups and metonymic set-ups in general. In such motion pictures as those of Charlie Chaplin and Esenstein, these devices in turn were overlaid by a novel, metaphoric montage with its lap dissolves -- the filmic similes" (1267).

Interestingly, he goes on to describe similarly structured observations in Freud's work with dreams (displacement or condensation metonymic, identification and symbolism metaphoric) -- also in Frazer's Golden Bough, in the classification of magic into homeopathic or imitative and contagious or, in Jakobson's terms, contiguous magic.

Now, to the extent that qualities were represented spatiotemporally, both would be spatially mediated by almost the same mechanisms. Hmn . . .

Wolfgang Iser

Iser, Wolfgang. "Interaction Between Text and Reader." Norton THEORY AND CRITICISM.

Iser has an interesting moment on page 1676, a few pages into the essay. He's describing something like what Schklovsky called defamiliarization, considering it as a basic factor in literature, quoting Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen, to support. He gives a statement that could fall right into Russian formalism except for its emphasis on the readers' position:

What is missing from the apparently trivial scenes [in Jane Austen's reserved prose], the gaps arising out of the dialogue -- this is what stimulates the reader into filling the blanks with projections" (1676).

No surprises here and none to follow, but he does articulate the situation admirably:

What is concealed spurs the reader into action, but this action is also controlled by what is revealed; the explicit in its turn is transformed when the implicit has been brought to light" (1676).

Now, what's really really big here is that there's a tendency for many late-formalists to priviledge the "gaps" or the "open" text in discussion, particularly discussion of hypertext and end-of-millenium American poetry.

Now, Iser's explicit deserves examination. This could be what the text signifies directly, but that's subject to the criticisms Derrida levelled at Searle over the issue of constative and performative language. But since that explicit must be a re-creation that the reader carries in mind on the fly during reading, the explicit or elements thereof must contain something like what Kristeva describes as chora in Revolution in Poetic Language. That is, the system here would seem to be that the reader approaches with ideas relatively fixed by experience, and re-interprets the text in accord with these. The text draws the reader into activities in which the reader projects his or her own ideas into unforseen situations, evaluates the results, and eventually revaluates the original ideas based on the results.

The essential insight here for formalists would be that discourse must be partially new, partially old; partially open, partially closed.

The convergence of many different semioticians and fellow travellers on this kind of point reinforces my confidence in it greatly. There is another aspect to integrate, however. All these folks seem to treat semantics and WORD atomistically, and that cannot work. There has to be a range of syntactic responsiveness or variability, a range of meaning, within semantics that corresponds to the need for flexibility presented by syntax.

The best model I have for that is the one that has come out here in discussions of Chomsky and Deleuze and Guattari. The word is not defined, but is a cluster of spatio-temporal and electro-physical associations that fire sympathetically with associations as created by syntax. Subjectively, this amounts to this: a word summons various "associations," but these are not cleanly distinct, and the summons is not at all digital. In other words, as the call-for-meaning firing happens, the general area fires sympathetically. Strength of association may be determined by physical proximity, or by some other factor of pattern similarity. Given the kinds of slips we make, probably both are true. The mix of association available to linguistic impulse must be extremely broad, since we talk about most anything, and we do so more easily than we represent, say, sights as sounds or smells as sights. (I should qualify this last because there is a strong correspondence between sight, sound, and kinetics that allows for very fluid transfer and re-representation; I suspect that this will be because each is rigged to represent spatiotemporal relations and our sort of personal GPS).

Continuing. His referential field is close to what I mean by frame, a term I in part took from Joe Byron's description of actual physical frames while discussing Apocalypse Now. But I mean the data grouped to combine for meaning. Ongoing consideration means re-grouping this in various ways recursively. There is also in some sense a group of groupings, but this is probably done in almost the same way.

So let's to Iser's discussion of this.

As the reader's wandering viewpoint travels between all these segments [POV's of narrators, characters/focalizers, plot, and fictitious reader], its constant switching during the time flow of reading intertwines them, thus bringing forth a network of perspectives, withi which each perspective opens a view not onoly of others, but also of the intended imaginary object" (1677-1678).

OK, let's call imagary object something like the old structuralist sujet, since it's clearly not the fabula or the language-object.

He grants the blank three functions:

The first structural quality of the blank, then, is that it makes possible the oganization of a referential field of interacting textual segments projecting themselves one upon another

Alright, we can tell that neither the blank nor any element of text does this. So Iser must mean that the reader does this in interaction with the text. However, that also means that the actual activity is not the spatial rearrangement described here, so Iser's indulging in a metaphor, consciously or not. What gives? This appears to resemble what Chomsky describes in his recursive structures, only he has chosen to focus on subsentence-level combinations. One might assume that the process, which every commentator describes as recursive, recurses at sentence, paragraph, and other narrative levels as well, and that the levels play into one another as Deleuze describes as well.

So the referential field is the combination of elements that shall be referred to one another, the parts of the assembled pattern. And in the recursion, the codified-abbreviated results of the previously assembled pattern become one element in the following pattern-field.

Unfortunately, Iser drops his parallel structure and does not straightforwardly describe a second function. However, in the cluster of metaphors that follow, he does leave some pretty good clues.

. . . the fact that they [segments present in the field] are brought together highlights their affinities and their differences.

This is still the first function, as the reader may observe. But Iser continues.

This relationship gives rise to a tension taht has to be resolved, for, as Arnheim has observed in a more general context: 'It is one of the functions of the third dimension to come to the rescue when things get uncomfortable on the second" [cites Toward a Psychology of Art. Berkeley, '67]. The third dimension comes about when the segents of the referential field are given a common framework, which allows the reader to relate affinities and differences and so to grasp the patterns underlying the connections" (1678).

Iser's dimensions are those of comparison, not of space, though human brains do seem to use spatial metaphors to describe these kinds of things, and there may be some biological basis for it. (If so, that probably involves streams of related neurons or dendrites selected from neurons, planes of related neural columns, then spaces. But this will be more complex than a 3d comparison will easily allow, since it has to involve proximities of firings, and presumably some crossing of data for comparison.

So what we have is an element that relies, in its nature, on a previous comparison; these elements are compared and combined on another level of comparison. Iser presents this as though the act retained all of the original data. It probably does not, but re-represents it in a more economical form, as a single pattern-unit, not completely discrete from associations.

This last qualifier, not completely discrete from associations is crucial and new to my thinking. There's a tendency to treat all of these things as discrete units, and it's inaccurate. The unit does not have crisp boundaries, but remains suggestive. So we have not completely lost the various components implicit in the assembled pattern-unit, but they are not all equally under attention in the abbreviated, assembled pattern unit; more precisely, they are not all summoned at once, not all firing at once.

Now we come to the third and most decisive function of the blank. Once the segments have been connected and determinate relationship established,a referential field i formed which constitutes a particular reading moment, and which in turn has a discernable structure. The grouping of segments within the referential field comes about, as we have seen , by making the viewpoint switch between teh persepective segments" (1678).

OK, again Iser insists that this kind of combination is only of POV's as opposed to universal for various pattern-units, but I think we can fairly ignore that and retain something very like Iser's superstructure.

I'd like to make some still unwarranted guesses about this process. First, that we would indeed have comparisons built of comparisons and patterns built of patterns. But also, we should beware of assuming that a new comparison means a new level of pattern as suggested by Iser's metaphor of dimension. Principles of biologial economy suggest that patterning devices will be re-used to the greatest extent consistent with processing, and that processing will even be compromised to some extent. After all, the human skull kills and cripples mothers and children in childbirth, makes adults slow, gives us back and neck injuries, and so forth. So a lot of times, the next "dimension" must be accomplished by iterating the comparison in ways somewhat analogous to the ways dimensions might be expressed in binary code. (That is, string gives one value, string gives another, string says how to assemble).

Now, I should note that later on he describes his second level of blank as a vacancy, and relates that "blanks refer to suspended connectability in the text, vacancies refer to nonthematic segments within the referential field of the wandering viewpoint" (1679). So he's trying to fix these cognitive events on aspects of the text, probably more than a little too categorically. After all, why would the reader not simply compare other things? Also, there is as yet no specific mention of the reader's experience, which of course is a constant feed of data in this, since it constitutes all semantic information, among other things.

Among other things of interest here, it's very clear in Iser's construction that the process he's talking about could not happen were the reader to determine story events. The process would be considerably different. I strongly suspect that an investigation of those differences (which I don't think I can manage right now!) would reveal something of the differences between a reading and a game.

William Stokoe: Sign Language Structure

Those with a semiotic bent may find fresh perspectives in Sign Language and Structure, by WIlliam C. Stokoe.

Stokoe, WIlliam C. Sign Language and Structure: The first linguistic analysis of American Sign Language. Silver Spring, MD: Linstock, 1978.

Stokoe's analysis of ASL is straightforward and basic. An early entry in a still-sparse field, it presumes no prior knowledge of signs and only a basic grasp of semiotics. For me, it verifited a few things that maybe should have been obvious.

Those of us who study literature study language that endures visually. One may well imagine Paradise Lost as sounds, but we have lost Milton's sounds in a way that we have not lost those of Joni Mitchell or John Coltrane. The recorded objects themselves, to which we refer and against which we true our conceptions of those sounds, make no more noise than the flipping of pages.

As such, we work in a visual medium. Yet ASL and similar sign languages are the only native visual languages, the only languages that anyone learns somewhat in the way that most of us learn our respective mother tongues. Since most of the deaf are deaf from birth or near-birth, they use signs as a native language: informally and formally, for public address and for private conversation, for personal calculation and for internal revery. I looked up Stokoe to see how native visual speakers inflect language, to see what implications that might have for inherently but backhandedly visual forms, like verse.

A few observations --

Visual and aural media use time differently because visual signs tend to endure. This is to a certain extent true even for signing, in which the signs generally skip by as quickly as speech; by extension, it should be at least as true for electronic presentations in which writing appears and disappears in response to links. Stokoe's appraisal in 1978 is interesting:

. . . significance rests not in the configuration, the position, or the movement, but in the unique composition of all three. The sign morpheme, however, unlike the morpheme or word of the spoken language, is seen as simultaneously not sequentially produced. Analysis of the sign morpheme then cannot be segmentation in time but must be aspectual (78).

But Stokoe complicates this observation by pointing out elsewhere that all signs for what we might consider words involve movement. Given that some signs will consist of a single morpheme, these must involve a certain temporality, however they might be considered.

Perhaps we hearing should not be surprised, since we take writing to move when it stays fairly still.

These signs must be temporal in two ways. They must be so first in the sense of taking up time in their own demonstration, given that the movement that defines the signing must not only take some time, but must pass slowly enough to register with a second party, another fluent signer; clearly, both signer and viewer take them as temporal in that way. Then, to whatever extent the signer cannot produce all the signs of a discourse at once, those signs must be interpreted as ordinal or sequential.
Stokoe may mean that each morpheme need be considered as a unit, as a kind of time-moment, but one might complain that this is just what we do with spoken language, the very process that he terms segmentation. Or he may refer to the simultaneous production of signs that arises when he discusses the utility of a signer's second hand:

. . . the signer may have a rhetorical use for the inactive hand. The left hand (of a right-handed signer) may hold a dez handshape [one that designates significance by its configuration] used in a sign for namign a person, while the right hand alone 'says something' perhaps about what another person did to the first (60).

This is something that cannot be done exclusively with a single voice. The parallels in speech-acts and in writing that one may consider make for some interesting consideration.

1. A title hangs on a page and refers to all the within.


2. An illustration, or, conversely, a caption


3. Italics, in Faulkner, for instance


4. A chord


5. A quickly picked guitar riff over a bass line with fewer notes.


6. A lecture with Powerpoint slides


7. According to Kristeva, Celine's use of invective


8. A navigational element in an HTML frameset or CSS layout.


9. A facial expression deliberately held and emphasized to accompany discouse (cf Grotowski on "organic" gestures, BTW!)

Of course there's no ending such a list conveniently. But I at least find it convenient to not think of interpretation of spoken language as breaking down into segments exactly, but into frames that include information external to what's accepted as linguistic or semantically active. For instance, the word fire means something different in a crowded theater than at an execution not because the syntax of the utterance has changed but because the most likely conclusion is different.

Some mechanism of this sort has to be operating fairly constantly to feed in the kinds of factors analyzed by Austin and others as speech acts. But this mechanism itself allows us to use aspects of discourse that we usually dismiss as nonlinguistic to create syntactic landscapes. It generally makes no syntactic difference to War and Peace that it be printed in 12-point or 10-point font, for example. But I take the larger print at the start of a chapter or on a page before the beginning of the novel to be a title. Further, I take it to name the work, and in doing so to modify without intermediary all the small print that accompanies it.

Again, one could go on about intonation and pitch and loudness and so forth, but short of explaining how these function, the point is probably too obvious: nonsemantic aspects of discourse mark phrase boundaries and other aspects of semantic elements and syntactic relations. These things may seem extraneous to literature or perhaps obtusely technical, but it seems something of this nature is needed to comprehend things like the continua of punctuation in Dickinson; Pound's "composition by the page"; the concrete poets or the "artists' books" from the 1980's; the dynamic relationship between layout, phrasing, paragraphing, and metanarrative in contemporary Website design; or, really, free verse.

Frege, Fragments, Fregments

Frege, Gottlieb. "On Sense and Meaning." Critical Theory Since 1965 Eds. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: U Fla, 1986.

I get a different vision of the relation of sentence and fragment as I read Frege on "subordinate sentences or clauses," (630). For all I know, he may have intended to refer to subordinate clauses in both cases, but the sudden recognition that of course certain sentences are subordinate to others made me extend ideas about how syntax crosses the so-called full stop.

Comp students have troubles with sentences in part because sentences in print don't operate exactly like sentences in speech. Those of us who write fluently may presume binary oppositions for ideas less oppositionally represented in speech. For instance, take the absolute nature of the period. Comp profs speak as though no information were carried over between sentences, or perhaps as though nothing in one sentence should determine the interpretation or at least the predication of the next. Of course, on examination, this is not at all true. Since it is not, the "incompleteness" of a fragment has to be relative.

As an aside, check Samuel Beckett's Nohow On, particularly the central of the three narratives, for the use of fragments. It's interesting to see the evolution of Beckett's work from the early items from the standard punctuation of the early work through the famous so-called (but NOT by Beckett himself) Trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, wherein the comma seems to drop off SB's keyboard; to How It Is which is without punctuation; to Nohow On and the last narratives, which often isolate predicative units from modifiers that can apply to various predicative units. It's a study: he does almost the identical thing in slightly more refined and compressed ways as time goes on. And he keeps at it over 50 years or so.

Even in standard writing, pronoun and noun-related things cross over period ends; they more often stop at paragraph ends in exposition. As I continue my readings I find that they frequently do not in narratives, particularly long, fluid, flowing narratives with a high level of closure and complex modification of topic, like Henry James or Edith Wharton.

Many aural constructions, by contrast, function on a kind of apposition. Cormac McCarthy would have some examples in print -- the predicates will hang because the subject, most often the focalizing character, has been previously described. Likewise one sometimes finds noun phrases with verbs implied or appositive to a prior sentence-object. This does something interesting with the articulation of that phrase itself. Because it's apparently detached from adjacent forms, it becomes more attached to the larger flow of language around it. The reader must take cues from the paragraphing or presumed content and make decisions about how the modification-subordinations would be grouped.

Kristeva has written something similar of Lous Ferdinand Celine's Castle to Castle -- a still better or at least more flagrant example, now that I think of it. Granted, most of these can be described more appropriately by using different punctuation, typically colons or dashes, which get underused in Celine and in naive writing as well, at least by academic standards. Celine uses elipses frequently, in his later works almost constantly, to punctuate his narrative. In that way he designates some kind of phrase boundaries without commiting himself to a certain set of grammatical relations between phrases.

Another example of a very different character would be the continuum of so-called dashes in Dickinson.

I want to see how this happens in ASL -- American Sign Language as used by the deaf -- specifically, what constitutes the end of a sentence, and to what extent it resembles writing and to what extent it resembles speech.

A bare beginning -- on Locke

Human Understanding. Book III, Chapter ii. "Of the Signification of Words." Section 1. Page Numbers below are from Adams, Hazard. Ed. Critical Theory Since Plato. Revised. NYC: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

Locke underlies much if not most later thought in English, including the basis of the systemic assumptions of a mutually sensible reality, common sense and so forth that give us William James, Richard Rorty, truths that we hold to be self-evident, and an emphasis on so-called constative value in speech. But Locke recognizes the nuance and limits of his ideas better than many of his followers. Specifically, while he decides that people share some commonality of thought by having similar sensing equipment, and he casts his doubts of universality more on words than on thoughts themselves, he does not assume that matters of language can or should or had might as well be dispensed with while examining thought.

He does get into some pretty messes, like anyone, I suppose, who attempts to describe human understanding. The above dichotomy between words and ideas creates a hierarchy in which words describe thoughts, but thoughts do not (always) describe words. The thoughts and words, by virtue of being non-identical, are also discrete. Also, he ignores the shifts in the meaning of words based on syntax and system, so he can assume that people thinking to themselves can have perfect understanding of the words they use.

[A logical progression here would be to check in with Paul de Man's response to Locke in one of the essay collections]


"Words are sensible signs necessary for communication" (254).
Sect 2 "Words are the sensible signs of his ideas who uses them"

". . . when [man] represents to himself other men's ideas by some of his own, if he consent to give them the same names that other men do, it is stilll to his own ideas; to ideas that he has, and not to ideas that he has not.
Sect. 3. This is so nessarry in the use of language, that in this respect the knowling thd the ignorant, the leaned and the unlearned, use the words they speak (with an y meaning) all alike. They, in every man's mouth, stand for the ideas he has, and whic hhe would express by them. A child having taken notice of nothing in themetal he hears called gold, but the bright shining hellow color, he applies the word gold only to khis known idea of that colous, and nothing else; and therfore calls the same colour in a peackck's tail, gold. Another, that hath better observed, adds to shining yellow great weight; and hten the sound gold, when he uses it, stands for a complex idea of a shinging yellow, and a very weighty substance" (255).

He goes on at some length, reporting that men unreasonably take words to refer to other men's ideas and to referents.

There's more here.

Grimke & Form

Contemporary readers will acknowledge that Scripture condemns slavery without testing her patient explanation, so Grimke's Appeal to Christian Women of the South interests primarily for what it does not say. Here, for instance, slavery is condemned for its similarity to Catholicism:

The Catholics are universally condemned, for denying the
Bible to the common people, but, _slaveholders must not_ blame them,
for _they_ are doing the _very same thing_, and for the very same
reason, neither of these systems can bear the light which bursts
from the pages of that Holy Book.

Before we dismiss Grimke's obvious New England ethnocentrism, let's examine that part of this that is correct. The condition of most Catholics in Europe and the Americas during the 1800's might be described by the word serfs. One might say of serfs, "At least they were not owned," but that isn't rigorously true. One who owns something or someone is held to have certain rights over it, but not others. I own my car, but that does not give me the right to drive on the sidewalk, run red lights, or chase down pedestrians. I must provide for certain features of its upkeep; if the CHP officer decides I'm driving it in poor working condition, I may receive an injunction to fix the car or keep it off the road. Likewise, the owner of a propery may find that others have rights to certain parts of it -- that the city has rights to run a sidewalk across the front yard or that the electric company is entitled to dig for cables. European nobles had less ownership over serfs than did American slaveowners, but in some ways they had more power than did the Hebrew slaveholders that American apologists were fond of citing to defend slavery. Serfs married as they please, but they were serfs for life, as were their children.

If we treat ownership as something that may be nuanced, the group Grimke addresses, Christian Women in the South, is itself more owned than owning. Women are generally an odd group among the oppressed, for they're generally granted luxury (with stipulations), but with reduced sovereignty. That is, certain others, generally male, are seen as having rights over them: they're more owned than owning.

Grimke condemns slavery in part because it's similar to Catholicism. It's similar, she argues, because Catholic orthodoxy witholds information from its subjects. Since the Catholics don't, or didn't read the Vulgate, on which the Papacy has always based doctrine, Catholics have or had less sovereignty over whatever decisions they might make that involved scripture. Now, note, hte abolitionist Grimke considers this aspect of Catholocism sufficiently reprehensible that she may summon it to condemn slavery. But at the same time, the very women she addresses have trouble getting information:

Other books and papers might be a great help to you in this investigation, but they are not
necessary, and it is hardly probable that your Committees of Vigilance will allow you to have any other.

So Grimke finds use of the Vulgate constitutes a loss of sovereignty for the Catholics, a loss commensurate with at least some aspects of slavery, a slavery in itself of sorts. At the same time, these Committees of Vigilance will deny southern women any document except the Bible. Even if one agrees with Grimke that this is a lesser offense than denying the Bible itself, that's witholding a lot of information.

The condition of women in the 1800's, like the institution of slavery, is something from which contemporary Americans might feel we can distance ourselves with justice. But if we see ownership as something that can be nuanced, and knowledge as necessary for sovereignty, the points of similarity that arise can be downright scary:

• Media ownership rules have been lifted, allowing few companies to own nearly all US media, thereby filtering news and culture for most of the population.


• Monopoly media, since it need fear little contradiction, has little motive to risk offending large advertisers, who may have vested interests in political decisions.


• Land-line and satellite-owning conglomerates have lobbied Congress to allow them to charge content-producers for passage of information over high-speed lines. This would


• The above companies have managd to advertise on broadcast television the idea that allowing them to charge and thereby dictate Net content constitutes "Net Freedom." While the campaign failed in Congress (this time), the ads ran largely unopposed.


• Many so-called educators feel that the "job" of education is to "pass on culture," to inculcate values or, more nefariously, to "prepare students for corporate positions."

Clearly, all these involve the same kind of piracy of sovereignty, though advancing media technology has made the media environment more heterogenous, at least for those privelidged to pay attention.

The modernity of the situation of Southern Women becomes even more disturbing when one sees how similar the defenses for modern political fiascos are to antebellum defenses for slavery. Grimke argues against slavery based on the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But this doctrine most are given simply in childhood becomes complex on application. We don't treat chickens as we would be treated, and we excuse that because they are differently other. Vegetarians may protest, perhaps justly, but we might as easily extend the analogy to carrots. I don't mean to minimize the major differences between applying a such a principle to people as opposed to chickens or even chickens as opposed to carrots, but the argument structurally resembles the argument an apologist might present for slaveholders: "The Golden Rule does not apply because the slaves are different."

To be clear, biological science and the slaveowners' well documented reproductive habits sharply contradict the apologists' argument in their behalf. But again the same form of argument comes into play repeatedly with regards to Amercan conflicts abroad. Note how the same form leads to bizarre ideation in each of the following arguments, which I suspect readers will find familiar:

• "We entered Vietnam because they were communists." They already implies that an entire population -- and one engaged in civil war at that! -- uniformly espoused a single ideology. Then, the passive construction were implies no action, but a state of being. Thus, they don't necessarily do anything that makes them communists; but when they sip tea, they sip tea as communists, and when they walk or bend over or scratch, they must do each of these things as communists. We could take their self-determination, then, because they were different. We can take what belongs to them because, not being free people, they are less deserving than us.
  
• We must remain in Iraq (Iran, Afghanistan, upi name it) because they are not ready for democracy.

The same rationale might have been used with equal justice by Edward Teach, for example, to justify his raids upon English and American shipping. The merchant and military crews had often been pressed into service or driven there by poverty; the profits would go to people who had not worked for them; and Teach's crew, by contrast, could vote on its course of action. Teach (AKA Blackbeard) held no slaves, in contrast to the Americans; he had no serfs and his workers voted, in contrast to the Spanish; he did not press people into service, in contrast to the English; he did not press sailors into service. His government may have been the most democratic in the English-speaking world in the 1800's.

Of course, that does no more for the ships he plundered than American voting rights do for Vietnamese, Iraqis, Argentines, Chilenos, Panamanians, Iranians, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Philipinos, Haitians, Nicaraguans, or -- well, given Greg Palast's recent work on how many Indian votes are thrown out, I'm tempted to add native Americans. But even if that constitutes a separate case, the list could be many times longer.

Grimke criticizes a warp in logic that has transcended theology, nominative ideology, and economic system to remain an active force. Formally, she does this by pointing out inconsistencies between a particular position with a document on which its purveyors hold it to be based. This does seem dated, but it's not because either the mistake or the slavery have stopped. And it's not because the Bible has ceased to be perverted as an instrument of torture. Each American president since Jimmy Carter has used faith to excuse killing for profit.

Perhaps Grimke seems dated because of a couple aspects of language. First, she regards scriptural arguments seriously enough to incorporate scripture in her answer, whereas contemporary western theocracy claims literal authorization by a text that it takes figuratively and which its leaders may not have read systematically. The other may be simply because slavery has taken different names. So we can sit over a cup of chocolate and relax, having abolished it.

Grimke & Form

Contemporary readers will acknowledge that Scripture condemns slavery without testing her patient explanation, so Grimke's Appeal to Christian Women of the South interests primarily for what it does not say. Here, for instance, slavery is condemned for its similarity to Catholicism:

The Catholics are universally condemned, for denying the
Bible to the common people, but, _slaveholders must not_ blame them,
for _they_ are doing the _very same thing_, and for the very same
reason, neither of these systems can bear the light which bursts
from the pages of that Holy Book.

Before we dismiss Grimke's obvious New England ethnocentrism, let's examine that part of this that is correct. The condition of most Catholics in Europe and the Americas during the 1800's might be described by the word serfs. One might say of serfs, "At least they were not owned," but that isn't rigorously true. One who owns something or someone is held to have certain rights over it, but not others. I own my car, but that does not give me the right to drive on the sidewalk, run red lights, or chase down pedestrians. I must provide for certain features of its upkeep; if the CHP officer decides I'm driving it in poor working condition, I may receive an injunction to fix the car or keep it off the road. Likewise, the owner of a propery may find that others have rights to certain parts of it -- that the city has rights to run a sidewalk across the front yard or that the electric company is entitled to dig for cables. European nobles had less ownership over serfs than did American slaveowners, but in some ways they had more power than did the Hebrew slaveholders that American apologists were fond of citing to defend slavery. Serfs married as they please, but they were serfs for life, as were their children.

If we treat ownership as something that may be nuanced, the group Grimke addresses, Christian Women in the South, is itself more owned than owning. Women are generally an odd group among the oppressed, for they're generally granted luxury (with stipulations), but with reduced sovereignty. That is, certain others, generally male, are seen as having rights over them: they're more owned than owning.

Grimke condemns slavery in part because it's similar to Catholicism. It's similar, she argues, because Catholic orthodoxy witholds information from its subjects. Since the Catholics don't, or didn't read the Vulgate, on which the Papacy has always based doctrine, Catholics have or had less sovereignty over whatever decisions they might make that involved scripture. Now, note, hte abolitionist Grimke considers this aspect of Catholocism sufficiently reprehensible that she may summon it to condemn slavery. But at the same time, the very women she addresses have trouble getting information:

Other books and papers might be a great help to you in this investigation, but they are not
necessary, and it is hardly probable that your Committees of Vigilance will allow you to have any other.

So Grimke finds use of the Vulgate constitutes a loss of sovereignty for the Catholics, a loss commensurate with at least some aspects of slavery, a slavery in itself of sorts. At the same time, these Committees of Vigilance will deny southern women any document except the Bible. Even if one agrees with Grimke that this is a lesser offense than denying the Bible itself, that's witholding a lot of information.

The condition of women in the 1800's, like the institution of slavery, is something from which contemporary Americans might feel we can distance ourselves with justice. But if we see ownership as something that can be nuanced, and knowledge as necessary for sovereignty, the points of similarity that arise can be downright scary:

• Media ownership rules have been lifted, allowing few companies to own nearly all US media, thereby filtering news and culture for most of the population.


• Monopoly media, since it need fear little contradiction, has little motive to risk offending large advertisers, who may have vested interests in political decisions.


• Land-line and satellite-owning conglomerates have lobbied Congress to allow them to charge content-producers for passage of information over high-speed lines. This would


• The above companies have managd to advertise on broadcast television the idea that allowing them to charge and thereby dictate Net content constitutes "Net Freedom." While the campaign failed in Congress (this time), the ads ran largely unopposed.


• Many so-called educators feel that the "job" of education is to "pass on culture," to inculcate values or, more nefariously, to "prepare students for corporate positions."

Clearly, all these involve the same kind of piracy of sovereignty, though advancing media technology has made the media environment more heterogenous, at least for those privelidged to pay attention.

The modernity of the situation of Southern Women becomes even more disturbing when one sees how similar the defenses for modern political fiascos are to antebellum defenses for slavery. Grimke argues against slavery based on the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But this doctrine most are given simply in childhood becomes complex on application. We don't treat chickens as we would be treated, and we excuse that because they are differently other. Vegetarians may protest, perhaps justly, but we might as easily extend the analogy to carrots. I don't mean to minimize the major differences between applying a such a principle to people as opposed to chickens or even chickens as opposed to carrots, but the argument structurally resembles the argument an apologist might present for slaveholders: "The Golden Rule does not apply because the slaves are different."

To be clear, biological science and the slaveowners' well documented reproductive habits sharply contradict the apologists' argument in their behalf. But again the same form of argument comes into play repeatedly with regards to Amercan conflicts abroad. Note how the same form leads to bizarre ideation in each of the following arguments, which I suspect readers will find familiar:

• "We entered Vietnam because they were communists." They already implies that an entire population -- and one engaged in civil war at that! -- uniformly espoused a single ideology. Then, the passive construction were implies no action, but a state of being. Thus, they don't necessarily do anything that makes them communists; but when they sip tea, they sip tea as communists, and when they walk or bend over or scratch, they must do each of these things as communists. We could take their self-determination, then, because they were different. We can take what belongs to them because, not being free people, they are less deserving than us.
  
• We must remain in Iraq (Iran, Afghanistan, upi name it) because they are not ready for democracy.

The same rationale might have been used with equal justice by Edward Teach, for example, to justify his raids upon English and American shipping. The merchant and military crews had often been pressed into service or driven there by poverty; the profits would go to people who had not worked for them; and Teach's crew, by contrast, could vote on its course of action. Teach (AKA Blackbeard) held no slaves, in contrast to the Americans; he had no serfs and his workers voted, in contrast to the Spanish; he did not press people into service, in contrast to the English; he did not press sailors into service. His government may have been the most democratic in the English-speaking world in the 1800's.

Of course, that does no more for the ships he plundered than American voting rights do for Vietnamese, Iraqis, Argentines, Chilenos, Panamanians, Iranians, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Philipinos, Haitians, Nicaraguans, or -- well, given Greg Palast's recent work on how many Indian votes are thrown out, I'm tempted to add native Americans. But even if that constitutes a separate case, the list could be many times longer.

Grimke criticizes a warp in logic that has transcended theology, nominative ideology, and economic system to remain an active force. Formally, she does this by pointing out inconsistencies between a particular position with a document on which its purveyors hold it to be based. This does seem dated, but it's not because either the mistake or the slavery have stopped. And it's not because the Bible has ceased to be perverted as an instrument of torture. Each American president since Jimmy Carter has used faith to excuse killing for profit.

Perhaps Grimke seems dated because of a couple aspects of language. First, she regards scriptural arguments seriously enough to incorporate scripture in her answer, whereas contemporary western theocracy claims literal authorization by a text that it takes figuratively and which its leaders may not have read systematically. The other may be simply because slavery has taken different names. So we can sit over a cup of chocolate and relax, having abolished it.

Fish

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Reading this selection from Fish's "Interpreting the Variorum," several problems appear.

Fish holds that the practices of "interpretive communities" predetermine readings.

For Fish, this is particularly powerful thing, because he considers the text to be what is read, not its object. Discussing a set of hypothetical readers with varying reactions to Lycidas, he comments, "A reader other than myself who, when presented with Lycidas (please keep in mind that the status of Lycidas is at issue), puts into execution a different set of interpretive strategies will perform a different succession of interpretive acts.) One of us might then be tempted to complain ot the other that we could not possibly be reading the same poem . . . and he would be right; for each of us would be reading the poem he made" (218).

Fish's wording rejects any difference made by the poem itself. Surely he would not deny that one reader using one consistent reading strategy will find Lycidas and Ashbery's "Skaters" different. But even this simple admission means that one cannot reasonably favor text or interpretation in an analysis, and that Fish misrepresents the activity he describes in claiming that "each of us would be reading the poem he made": the poem is as least as validly represented as an articulated entity that includes its readers and readings.

One might dismiss such distinctions as semantic equivocation, but Fish demonstrates the potential for error within a few pages as he good-naturedly noodges his reader towards his conclusion: "knowing full well that you will agree with me (that is, understand) only if you already agree with me" (221).

Here Fish baits his hook: as I start to disagree, I appear to demonstrate his point. But note here a couple assumptions in his particular writing strategy. He gives agree with me as equivalent to understand. He doesn't mean anything so unsubtle as that understanding consists in alliance with one Stanley Fish, but that understanding consists in sharing common assumptions. This statement differs sharply from asserting only that the judgment of understanding conferred by one interpretive community will depend on a convergence of reading strategies. Fish states that understanding itself amounts to this social relationship as opposed to, say, some correspondence to a physical text in a given set of contexts.

If one follows Fish's statements syllogistically, the text effectively disappears -- something Fish clearly does not intend, since he actually grants qualities to texts and distinguishes extensively between texts himself.

Another factor that gets lost is the effect of the text itself on interpretative strategy. Does one not form an interpretive strategy primarily by reading and interpreting texts? If this is so, it stands to reason that readers' interpretative strategies tend to be different at the end of a book than at the beginning. How often does Fish himself note that Milton plays against one's interpretive strategy? Does Fish suppose that Milton will frustrate my strategies every few lines, but that I won't wake up to that by Book X?

Longinus

Longinus shrinks and shrink-wraps Aristotle. Where Aristotle attempts to describe living literature, pressing upon it form and category and not unmindful of the violation, Longinus prescribes. Those wishing a good critical review of Aristotle's strictures (something that bears quite directly upon any practical use of Longinus' theories) might check out J. Hillis Miller's Reading Narrative, which methodically pries apart Aristotle's readings of Homer and, particularly Sophocles. Miller doesn't answer all the questions he raises, but then, doing so may take some time.

Meanwhile, what we have at least thought we were doing writing fiction and drama has as much to do with Aristotle and Longinus as just about anybody.

Longinus grants five principles of sublime art, most of which are moderately self-explanatory as far as he investigates them:

1. Conception of "high" idea. He does conflate "high" both with selfless and with social status, though he seems most concerned with the requirement to see outside of one's POV. The gesture feels like Kant's more extensively articulated descriptions in A Critique of Judgment.
2. Passion.
3. Figure -- He divides these into figures of thought and figures of expression, apparently but not explicitly regarding these as separable even while granting thought a figure.
4. Diction
5. Elevation.
* ability to perceive beyond individual perspective
* even under duress
* amplification -- by which he seems to mean something like what writing primers call parallel structure. He gives Demosthenes' reliance on parallel structure as occurring most when listeners are to be "most enthralled" (83). I suspect if one thinks of MLK, that's a good comparison. He goes on about Cicero:

"The profusion of Cicero is in place where the hearer must be flooded with words, for it is appropriate to the treatment of commonplaces, and to perorations for the most part and digressions, and to all descriptive and declamatory passages, and to writings on history and natural science, and to many oher departments of literature" (83)

As the flood of words fits the common, so the channeled words with repetition, with alignment of sensual details, fits the exalted, the noble, the sublime -- a rather nifty observation, however one may want to play with dichotomies of high and low. And I think the analysis gains from his treating fictional and nonfictional, poetic and rhetorical discourse within the same rubric.

He holds amplification attainable in part by the implementation of various techniques:

EMULATION of previous poets. Attitudes about copying have changed vastly with the refinement of systems of production and distribution of texts. For a medieval person to criticize the copying of a text would be like somone criticizing Olivier for copying Shakespeare because he played Hamlet. For more on this, Ong, Walter, especially Orality and Literacy. Jerzy Grotowsky had related observations on the differences between performers from literate and pre-literate cultures, but I'm not certain he ever got them into writing. I intend to go back through the one collection I have seen of his work:

Grotwski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. London: Methuan, -- I'm not sure what year.

IMAGES -- ". . . the design is enthrallment". He uses an example by Demosthenes to indicate that image must correspond to argument, an issue of qualifications in a sense almost like Stephen Toulmin's, although not articulated in detail.

WORDS WITHOUT CONNECTING LINKS. He gives an example from Xenophon, but misunderstands it, if I may judge by the translation: "'Locking their shields,' says Xenophon,'they thrust fought slew fell.'" He describes the urgency created by the rush of words, but neglects the logical distinction: these seem to become, in a sense, one action. They move a step closer to being hyphenate. There's a suggestion, then, not only of rush, but of a lack of intervening reflection. Altogether it's a fine observation, and deserves more attention.

For examples, see the following:

1) Nakell, Martin. Two Fields that Face and Mirror Each Other, which makes frequent successful use of the form. Nakell seems abundantly aware of both the effects on intensity and the warps of logic involved.

2) Kristeva, Julia. "From One Castle to the Other." I don't recall which collection this is in, but she considers L.F. Celine's obtrusive swearing and elipses as dissociating elements from sentence syntax, thereby, she claims, slamming them directly into the syntagma. There's a natural ground here for reflections on the shifts of syntax and signification within the sentence as controlled by factors outside the sentence itself.

3) The Objectivist poets, with their concern with the "little words." One has to dig for this, but I'd go through George Oppen and Louis Zukovsky particularly, and notice the play with (and without!) prepositions and articles.

4) Ginsberg does this and seems to do it more in his best work, although I'd argue that the effect seems different than that which Longinus describes. He seems to associate this with the "lengthening of the line in American Poetry" that he discusses frequently. In some interview, Ginsberg says he finds connection more interesting and powerful than disconnection. In his classes at Naropa (some are available on mp3, as are a lot of other wonderful things, on the Naropa Website) he seems extensively concerned with relations between this kind of diction and breath and Charles Olsen's "Projective Verse" and a relation to Buddhism.

INVERSIONS - Longinus claims that inversions make for intensity. Go figure. Perhaps Celine's interjections or Dickinson's repeated pauses might be construed as a positive example of this. But one can as easily posit the urbane inversions of John Milton or Henry James as counterexamples. On the other hand, one wonders whether Longinus is not taking a different view of intensity itself.

* REPETITIONS - He names this separately from the parallelism above, but gives little reason for the distinction
* DIALOG - cites the enhanced immediacy as opposed to narrative.
* 3RD PERSON NARRATOR ASSUMES 1ST PERSON, PAST BECOMES PRESENT.
* PERIPHRASIS = Contemporary "making strange"
* METAPHORS he treats separately from images. Says little of it, as though the question were whether to use them, not how they function or differences between them.
* HYPERBOLE - he doesn't really describe this.

ELEMENT 5 - ARRANGEMENT OF WORDS IN A CERTAIN ORDER -- In this he recognizes sublimity an effect of syntax or syntagm, of arrangement:

"So the constitutents of grandeur, when separated from one another, carry with them sublimity in distraction and when further encircled in a chain of harmony they become sonorous by their very rotundity; and in periods sublimity is, as it were, a contribution made by a multitude" (96 Hazard Adams).