What can my nonsense tell me about you?
pp. 66-76
in: David Rudrum (ed), Literature and philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2006Abstract
Who would ask such a question? What could my nonsense tell me about you? If, as seems reasonable, the sense of a sentence is just the thought expressed, and if the logical form of that thought depends on a normative usage of words, then how can nonsense say anything? Why would anyone imagine that the deformation of the normative sense of words, with the resulting obfuscation of thought, could produce any further kind of sense that might matter? And yet such deformations are often attempted in modern poetry and literature. The writings of Gertrude Stein are exemplary of such aesthetically motivated nonsense, and thus offer a test case for the sense we can discover in nonsense.
