User:DeRossitt/Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science

Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science is a 2002 book by literary scholar Steven Meyer.

Overview
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Reception
Ellen E. Berry in Modern Fiction Studies: Meyer's complex, ambitious, and wide-ranging study makes a valuable contribution to Stein scholarship, to modernism studies, and to science studies more generally (it is a volume in Stanford's Writing Science series).

Irresistible Dictation makes an extremely useful contribution to Stein scholarship. By concentrating on the lifelong effects of Stein's early scientific training on her writing practice, Meyer both illuminates new aspects of Stein's philosophy of composition and adds to our understanding of this comparatively neglected early period of Stein's career. And, by focusing on relations between lit erature and modern biological theory—rather than on models de rived from the New Physics as most other literary critics have done Meyer opens exciting new avenues for the study of how scientific doctrine interacts with literary production.

Stephanie L. Hawkins in Modern Fiction Studies: In a long overdue study of the scientific basis of Stein's experimental writing, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science, Steven Meyer ascribes to Stein a procedural poetics that both documents the process of the mind in the act of writing and foregrounds the processes (cognitive and compositional) by which writing takes place.

Elizabeth Leane in The Review of English Studies: While Meyer takes a close and revealing look at Stein's scientific training at the Harvard Psychological Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins Medical School, he does not promote a version of the standard influence model of the relationship between science and literature, i.e., that Stein's experimental writing was influenced by the experimental science of her day. Rather, he argues the far stronger case that Stein 'reconfigured science as writing and performed scientific experiments in writing'.

By approaching Stein from this oblique angle, Meyer is able to give new insight into the literary and philosophical traditions and contexts relevant to her writing-he looks specifically at Sterne, Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Pater as well as Emerson, Whitehead, James, and Susanne Langer-and no doubt Stein scholars will find much of worth here.

Lynn M. Morgan in Comparative Studies in Society and History: is the most rigorous examination to date of how Stein's scientific work influenced her understanding of the boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity, concreteness and abstraction, and sense and nonsense. Meyer argues that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is intriguing precisely because it blurs the traditional boundaries between biographical subject, biographer, and biography (Meyer 1992; 2001).

Omri Moses in Twentieth Century Literature: This essay will read biological discourses alongside literary and philosophical ones in order to stress the nonexclusivity of scientific models and to use humanistic frameworks to help recontextualize rather than simply apply scientific thought—and thus conceive biological concepts in a new way, as it were, in a non-native environment. Through Stein I aim to draw attention to strands of Darwin's thinking that do not feature prominently either in contemporary biological discourses or in the sociopolitical ones that initially succeeded in claiming his legacy. Indeed, her work brings us back to a moment when science was renegotiating its relations to culture and to cultural and humanistic endeavor, notoriously following in the wake of Darwin's own turbulent ideas. I will highlight in her work what appears to be a startling continuum between biology and culture that contests both concepts of biological essentialism and social constructivism. In this way I hope to carry on the task commenced by Steven Meyer of "examining the complex interweavings of writing and science in [Stein's] compositional practices" (Irresistible Dictation xvi).

Paul Stevens in Twentieth Century Literature: Stevens draws heavily on Meyer's work: "change. Steven Meyer, for example, has admirably and exhaustively described in her work "the correlations of writing and science," as the subtitle of his Irresistible Dictation would have it. Drawing in part on his research, in what follows I will explore in her work the correlations of writing and information. I argue that Stein's interest in questions of attentiveness and information saturation informs her writing."

Michael H. Whitworth in Isis: Meyer not only locates Stein’s writing in relation to her contemporaries and forebears but invokes the support of more recent philosophers and scientists in the radical empiricist tradition. Thus Susanne Langer and Gerald Edelman are as important for Meyer as Whitehead and James, and their posteriority to Stein is insignificant. Meyer’s approach is “historicist” only if we accept a continuity between Stein’s period and our own. Her work matters, the approach implies, because the problems she investigated are of continuing importance. At times, however, Meyer’s uncritical adoption of recent science looks like scientism; Irresistible Dictation looks at first like a historical study, but folded within it is a popular science book in the prophetic mode.

Brenda Wineapple in Boston Review: What he does—wonderfully well—is suggest why Stein slowly begins to remove her writing “from the dictates, respectively, of place and time,” and what that removal portends. Stein’s radical compositions do not try to reproduce an already-existent reality, as Meyer points out; her words create the reality of their making, which, Stein insists, is intrinsic to American writing: “the disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything and anything from something.”

In fact, the connection between Emerson and Stein is one of the several great pleasures of Meyer’s study, and it is from Emerson that Meyer takes the title of his book. “Irresistible dictation” is our fate, said Emerson in his essay “Fate,” but “if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation understands itself.”