Albert Cook

Bio: Albert Cook is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Deixis & Pound (mass). The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 2 publications receiving 1 citations.

Some Notes on Gertrude Stein and Deixis

Abstract: I ERTRUDE stein early took the \"postmodern\" lead of profoundly 'questioning, while at the same time enlisting, the deixis inherent in a linguistic act. Now language itself, to be significant all, must begin with deixis, word by word. It cannot help calling up the signified of a \"horse\" for the signifier of those letters, and it cannot further help triggering all the interesting epistemological dynamics of reference that will connect the signified to the real beast with hooves and mane sweating in the field. Nouns, verbs, and whole propositions go through a comparable deixis. They cannot avoid pointing. But how mediate between the fact of pointing and the epistemological dynamics? Such a mediation could not simply go about pointing; it would have to show the epistemological structure, which could happen by skewing the pointing. In the light of questions about deixis, Gertrude Stein's powerful leverage can be derived from her systematic distancing of the referent from her immediate sentences in what could be called a super-Stoicism. She forces her sentences to stand free by refusing an ordinary prepositional correspondence to the referents of her words, taken one by one, in the context she has established for them. Aristotle's logic breaks down propositions into the term constituents of assertions. They are referential, term for term. The whole sentences of Stoic logic, however, are first of all \"linguistic,\" leading the way to the self-referentiality and skewing of relation of wotd to object through arbitrariness that has variously occupied thinkers from Peirce and Saussure to the present. As Derrida is the pupil of both Freud and Husserl, so Gertrude Stein was

Projections of Measure: The Continued Synergies of Pound and Williams

Abstract: Poetry is intrinsically musical, and it calls for a kind of invention which may not be solved by reverting to the tune of some received meter, though that solution contented Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Wallace Stevens, among othets. Rimbaud, however, as a metrical American poet (Hart Crane) reminded himself, did say \"il faut être absolument moderne,\" pre-echoing the \"Make It New\" of Pound and Confucius' bathtub. The imperatives of inventing a live music in poetty can present themselves as problems, and one can too easily ignore those problems by reversion to received conventional, or even received \"unconventional\" solutions. To find and invent his music, the poet at all times is called upon to hear and adjudicate among the possibilities before him. These possibilities, in almost all but the most primitive societies, are multiple, and call for resolution, even if, like Lucretius and Propertius and Vergil and Ovid, the poet has made the choice of a single pattern measure, or, like Catullus and Horace, has chosen from among a group of given measures. The solution of all these Roman poets is to exploit special possibilities within their given metets. Unique solutions seem to have been sought, and found, so far as we can tell from the slender evidence before us, by the earliest Greek lyric poets; by Alemán and Sappho, as well as by Pindar. Chaucer evolved his Mozartian mettical fluency, the most finelytuned for centuties, out of a number of French and Italian possibilities