Stein and Wittgenstein: A Panel

At the 1996 MLA Convention Marjorie Perloff organized for the Poetry Division a panel on Stein and Wittgenstein. As part of that panel, I was so pleased by the papers that I pursued their publication; now that others can read the exchange, I am even more pleased.

I found most striking about the two primary papers, by Stephen Meyer and Jacques Lezra, their willingness to go beyond the topic of the panel. Instead of simply adapting Wittgenstein to Stein (as I do in my response), they insisted on using the topic as a license for probing into modern intellectual life. Meyer takes on the lonely and difficult task of separating Stein from Wittgenstein and using what is most radical in her as a wedge for claiming that William James offers a more productive context for such modern experiments than does Wittgenstein. Jacques Lezra proposes just the opposite case, spelling out what seems to him suspicious in the forms of immediacy and identity that Stein claims for herself, and dramatizing the possibility of bringing to bear even on Stein the modes of suspiciousness developed in post-structural theory. Confronted with these impressive performances, Linda Voris and I take very different paths in our responses. I challenge the understandings of Wittgenstein that each paper employs, in the hope of teasing out what he shares with Stein’s experimental spirit; Voris offers us precise and telling reminders that there are important aspects of Stein’s work that we are likely to distort if we turn to any philosophers for sustaining contexts before first working out the intricacies of Stein’s own claims about and for her writing.