William Gass

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William Gass, 2011

William Howard Gass (born July 30, 1924 in Fargo , North Dakota , † December 6, 2017 in University City , Missouri ) was an American writer and professor of philosophy .

life and work

Born in North Dakota in 1924, Gass grew up in Warren, Ohio . He described his childhood as unhappy with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother.

He graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown . He described the subsequent service in the Navy during World War II as the worst time of his life. In 1947 he graduated from Kenyon College and received his doctorate in 1954 from Cornell University with the linguistic dissertation A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor . During his studies at Cornell University Gass dealt more intensively with Wittgenstein's philosophy ; one of his teachers was Max Black , who continued Wittgenstein's philosophy of language as an influential exponent of analytical philosophy in the USA.

Gass himself taught at several universities, most recently from 1969 to 1999 as a professor at Washington University in St. Louis , Missouri . In 1978, when he met the contemporary writer and professor John Gardner at the University of Cincinnati , a sensational controversy arose over his essay On Moral Fiction . While Gardner demanded the moral responsibility of the author and his literary publications for current events and wanted to see reality changed through literature, Gass took the position in the debate that language can never grasp reality. Since the writer is limited to the world of his words, he cannot improve people either.

The work of Gertrude Stein was one of the reasons that he also turned to literary writing. He started publishing short stories in the late 1950s . Gass named the anger he felt during his childhood a significant influence on his work and even referred to his writing as reckoning.

At the end of the 1960s, Omensetter's Luck (1966), In The Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968) and Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife (1968) were three works by Gass, which some critics consider to be among the more important works of experimental storytelling were. So his "essay-novella" was Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife for example, as "prime Example of metafiction" (dt. "Excellent example of metafiction "), or "virtual casebook of literary experimentalism" (dt. "Real manual experimental literature") praised . Gass himself, on the other hand, described his extremely experimental attempt to shape the self-meaning of language as a medium in the work of art through the creation of the text as a reading act and as an identical sexual act as unsuccessful.

The text of Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife is printed on different types of paper and in different colors, which are intended to correspond to the feelings and perceptions indicated in the text of the people involved in the act of creation. Different types of printing are used in each part; the reader should read the mixed word sequences of the same print type one after the other. With this, Gass tries to break the convention of continuous linear reading. The extra-literary or extra-textual reality, in a reversal of the normal relationship between language and reality, only serves as a metaphor for describing the origin of the text.

After the publication of his essay novella , Gass published his literary theoretical views in a series of critical writings, which have now been collected in four volumes. Above all, the first volume Fiction and the Figures of Life found a wider distribution in English-speaking countries.

According to Gass, all fictions, which for him include not only literature, but also philosophy, natural sciences or mathematics, are primarily systems of meaning whose usefulness is based solely on their internal consistency, but not on their relationship to the outside world as mimetic representation or correspondence. Therefore there are no longer any descriptions for him in the experimental literature, only constructions. The fictional world is built up purely imaginary with the help of words, concepts as well as transformation and inference rules and does not have to resemble actual reality. With this idea of ​​the autonomy of the linguistic work of art, Gass takes up ideas of New Criticism with which he was confronted during his studies at Kenyon College, at the time one of the strongholds of New Criticism with John Crowe Ransom . Unlike New Criticism, however, Gass in no way understands the linguistic construct as a possible “model” for reality.

The extensive self-referentiality of literature postulated by Gass in his theoretical writings also characterizes his novels and stories, which oppose an aesthetic of realism . The formal language structure has a clear priority over the content; traditional text constituents such as plot or causal course of action or realistic character design are mostly abandoned; in its place comes the creative power of the pure word.

2015 he was awarded for his novel Middle C , the William Dean Howells Medal- . From 1982 until his death he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1983 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Gass died in University City in December 2017 at the age of 93.

Works

Fiction

  • Omensetter's Luck (1966)
  • In The Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968)
  • Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife (1968)
  • The Tunnel (1995), German translation by Nikolaus Stingl : Der Tunnel . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-498-02488-8 .
  • Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (1998)
  • Middle C (2013), German translation by Nikolaus Stingl: Mittellage . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-4980-2527-4 .

Non-fiction

  • Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970)
  • On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976)
  • The World Within the Word (1978)
  • Habitations of the Word (1984)
  • Finding a Form (1996)
  • About Robert Walser. Two essays. Translated by Jürg Laederach . Residence, Salzburg 1997 ISBN 3-7017-1085-6
  • Reading Rilke : Reflections on the Problems of Translation (1999)
  • Tests of Time (2002)
  • A Temple of Texts (2006)

Web links

Commons : William H. Gass  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jane Henderson: Acclaimed author William H. Gass of University City dies at 93 . In: stltoday.com . ( stltoday.com [accessed December 7, 2017]).
  2. ↑ See Franz Link: William H. Gass . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 375-382, here p. 375.
  3. ↑ See Franz Link: William H. Gass . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 375-382, here pp. 375-377.
  4. ↑ See Franz Link: William H. Gass . In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 - Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn u. a. 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , pp. 375-382, here pp. 375f.
  5. ↑ See Martin Schulze: History of American Literature . Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-549-05776-8 , p. 575f.
  6. ^ Members: William H. Gass. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 30, 2019 (with list of awards).
personal data
SURNAME Gass, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gass, William Howard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH July 30, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Fargo , North Dakota , USA
DATE OF DEATH December 6, 2017
Place of death University City , Missouri , USA