…popularized a school of thought alleging that everybody is in fact an artist, in some form, one way or another? Or at least something similar.
Yeah. Off the cuff, Nietzsche had a similar view (I’m thinking of his notebooks collected as The Philosopher’s Book, which AFAIK was only published under that title in French, but is in English in some of the Stanford editions if you look hard enough), as did Bergson, and Deleuze and Guattari had some stuff along those lines. Not too sure, to be frank, but you might get some hits on these.
Spinoza, quite possibly. Leibniz with his combinatoria thing may not have been far off, either. Also, Roman Ingarden had a view of language and creativity that seems close to what you’re after AFAIK his major works are either OOP in English or, his main book, The Controversy over the Existence of the World was never even translated, except by him, from Polish into German. His notion of the ontology of fictional objects as relates to other ideal objects would seem to indicate a similar view to what you’re after. Of course, Ingarden had special regard for “proper” poetry, but his core ideas seem to tend to the direction you’re after. Certainly Husserl in the Logical Investigations had a view of natural, regular language being as complex and decomposable as a good old fancy-pants poem.
In short, don’t really know off-hand, just spitballing some ideas.
Oh, plenty of theory from the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group supports your theory very well – I don’t recall which, but look into Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Lynn Heijiniman (My Life might be good). Since you said writers as well, those could be just fine. Also the group of writers under OuLiPo, even though they were all about the formal, didn’t seem outright opposed to your view in general.
Geez, 3x post – but the Israeli linguist Reuven Tsur (IIRC) has some good stuff building off Jakobson’s theory of the meaning of phonemes. For that matter, the notion of “poetic language” hits good off Jakobson and Kristeva’s books on poetics – the line is very much blurred between a – let’s call it “functional” – use of language and a poetic use of language. You’ll get close to the heart of your project by looking at some of these latter two (at least) famous linguists.
Some guy named Will Somethingorother is pretty well known for saying “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” There’s a slightly updated version by some dude Nigel, Niles, N… something Pert: “All the world’s indeed a stage, and we are merely players; performers and portrayers. Each another’s audience, outside the gilded cage.”
Ooh. Goffman, The Representation of the World as something something. Something like that. Great little sociology book (Goffman’s magnum opus is Frame Analysis but that’s not really relevant). Don’t know how it’s called in English, but has lots of great anecdotes about French sailors coming home to their parents on leave and saying stuff like, “Pass me that whore of a butter, ma.”
ETA oh yeah, that Will – or was it Willy? – can never remember. Yeah, he had some good stuff on this point. He turns that thing all the way up and beyond in that little thing he wrote.
WRT to Ingarden ideal objects other than fictional objects (say, Sherlock Holmes or Hamlet), might be things like numbers or objects like colors and so forth, or logical operators, or territorial lines between nations, or even nations themselves. It’s hard to talk about without getting straight on the terminology, and I don’t wish to throw a bunch of jargon on you unless you want to get into it.
Nigel??? Are you talking about the co-author of that great real-life story of “Saucy Jack”? Oh, I see, you meant one of those guys up on the riser, at least from perspective of the audience. Never mind, my bad.
All right, fess up, OP – is this for some little term paper or assignment? You could make a very convincing case (it might be wrong, but it still could be plausible) for any of the above philosophers and linguists, and even that minor poet Shakespeare, espousing your view.
What’s your angle? I want to know, because this could have been an interesting thread instead of just a wank-off.
Then there’s that distinguished philosopher Raymond D. Davies, who pointed out that “Everybody’s a dreamer, everybody’s a star, everybody’s in movies, it doesn’t matter who you are.”
Hey, there was a good one – who wrote that? He was a writer, so it counts, “If I told you, I could write a book, about the way you blah blah and look!” That’s proof! Maybe it was “If you asked me” and maybe it was van Heusen – didn’t google [sic] it, but it didn’t sound right to me. Love that tune, though. Sucks I can’t remember the “poem.”