COLGR49: Inverarity

[calbert at hslboxmaster.com]

Can't remember where it came up, but "Pierce" is possibly a 
reference to the Cambridge pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce

"Charles Sanders Peirce -- the family name was
        earlier spelled "Pers" and thus is pronounced like
        "purse" -- was an American philosopher,
        scientist, and humanist. An intellectual figure of
        extraordinary power and accomplishment,
        Peirce was -- among many other things -- the
        primary founder of the distinctively American
        philosophical tradition called "pragmatism" and a
        mentor of the other founding figures, such as
        William James, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce.
        Some other of many figures associated in one
        way and another with this tradition are G. H.
        Mead, C.I. Lewis, Justus Buchler, Richard Rorty,
        and Hilary Putnam.
              Peirce is also the primary
        source of the contemporary
        philosophical conception of
        "semiotic" as a general theory of
        representation and
        interpretation. As developed by
        Peirce, semiotic is a
        phenomenologically based and
        highly generalized critical theory -- a logic with
        application beyond the traditional domain to
        which logic in the ordinary sense is restricted --
        and can also be understood to be a general
        theory of interpretation which provides
        analytical instruments applicable to
        representation and significance of every sort
        with no privileging of distinctively linguistic
        conceptions. Peirce's semiotic is primarily
        oriented toward communication rather than
        language, and is distinct from the semiotics
        (originally called "semiologie" or "semiology")
        developed by extrapolation from the linguistics
        of Ferdinand de Saussure. Umberto Eco is a
        well-known semiotic theorist and analyst as well
        as novelist whose work reflects both traditions,
        and Roman Jakobson is one of a number of
        influential linguists who have attempted to
        broaden the conception of linguistics as a science
        by incorporating aspects of Peirce's
        communicational conceptions. Peirce's semiotic
        is much broader in conception and possible
        application than these comparisons might tend
        to suggest, though. "

more @ http://www.door.net/arisbe/whoiscsp/whoiscsp.htm

anyone who survived reading my posts on Chauncey Wright should 
note that Peirce and Wright were part of the same circle......

love,
cfa


> In _A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49_, J. Kerry Grant states the
> following:
> 
> " . . . Mac Adam claims that Inverarity represents the artist.  'His
> given name, Pierce . . . evok[es] the phallic stylus violating the
> white purity of the page, while his last name, Inverarity, hints at
> such concepts as inveracity and inversion, the illusory or lying
> aspects of writing'" (Grant, p. 8).
> 
> Given the story of Joyce's Stephen D and his search for a true
> aethetic, and Pynchon's Oedipa and her search for truth amid webs of
> deceit, I find these comments interesting.
> 
> 
> > The name "Inverarity" also appears in James Joyce's _A Portrait of
> > the Artist as a Young Man_:
> >
> > "The pages of his timeworn Horace never felt cold to the touch even
> > when his own fingers were cold: they were human pages: and fifty
> > years before they had been turned by the human fingers of John
> > Duncan Inverarity and by his brother, William Malcolm Inverarity. 
> > Yes, those were noble names on the dusky flyleaf . . ." (Viking
> > edition, p. 179).
> >
> > This passage comes toward the beginning of the final chapter, in
> > which we now see Stephen as an erudite, albeit slightly arrogant,
> > young man who is about to discuss his theory of aesthetics with the
> > Dean.
> >
>