Browse

This book offers the first systematic account of modern literary and philosophical conceptions of the sentence. It opens by demonstrating that there is little agreement about what a sentence is, what makes one effective or elegant, and whether there are aesthetic or political grounds for resisting its organizational hegemony. The chapters explore a range of attempts to challenge traditional logical, grammatical, and stylistic paradigms. With Hegel’s speculative sentence, the Romantic aphorism, and the Marxist slogan, the authority of the classical proposition is tested as writers search for verbal formations capable of reshaping the relationship between language, thought, and action. Pitting lineation against the dictates of syntax, poets such as Whitman and Dickinson experiment with different forms of versification in crafting new patterns of discourse. With Flaubert, writing becomes a process of endlessly revising individual sentences, with no way to determine when one will be finished. Questioning whether we even know what a sentence is, modernists such as Pound, Stein, and Hemingway rethink basic compositional goals, beginning with the desire to write clearly and simply. The book closes by arguing that an investment in great writing has always been an ethical and political as well as an aesthetic commitment. If a fetish for great sentences has largely replaced the veneration of great books, little attention has been paid to the ideologies that underlie such stylistic ideals.

A Different Order of Difficulty recasts the significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for studies in literary modernism (and vice versa), reading Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, and Coetzee within the framework of a study of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and still more broadly after Wittgenstein—in light of his contemporaneous writing and recent scholarly thinking about his philosophy. Zumhagen-Yekplé argues that looking at Wittgenstein’s project in relation to literary modernism deepens our understanding of both, demonstrating the power of his methods to awaken critics and philosophers alike to how twentieth-century literature and thought are crucially motivated by three shared interwoven core commitments. These central preoccupations, which go on to shape modernism’s afterlife in contemporary fiction, arise from an attachment to oblique ethical instruction, a yearning for transfigurative change, and to a spiritually and existentially demanding order of difficulty that exceeds the multiple intellectual challenges or calls for erudition the self-consciously crafted “Big Works” of high modernism also notoriously entail. Breaking with traditional conceptions of Wittgenstein’s work that obscure his fixation on these modernist concerns, Zumhagen-Yekplé makes a literary-critical contribution to the “resolute” program of Wittgenstein scholarship, reading the Tractatus not as the metaphysical theory it only appears to advance, but as a complex mock-theoretical, high-modernist puzzle. To look at Wittgenstein’s early text in this way is to see it as a formally revolutionary aesthetic medium for its author’s unorthodox brand of ethical instruction, crafted to engage readers in the therapeutic and transformative activity of clarification he saw as the true work of philosophy and literature.

Description is a ubiquitous feature of novels, but it has typically been considered secondary (if not an obstacle) to the demands of narrative. This prejudice was especially pronounced in the early twentieth century among varied thinkers (from Virginia Woolf to Georg Lukács) who were reacting to the growth of descriptive details (especially of settings and objects) in nineteenth-century fiction. Strange Likeness seeks to vindicate description’s place in the novel, and to do so by examining the corpus of modernist fiction, centrally the works of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Woolf. In spite of their criticisms, descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for these writers, who maintained an empiricist commitment to the observation of experience but who turned their attention to intangible phenomena, such has the atmosphere of a room, similarities of relations, and affective states. They thus continued the realist project of describing the world, but uncoupled from its usual associations with a prose of things on the one hand and visualization on the other. Moreover, modernist experiments highlight the variety of descriptive functions: as a technology of social knowledge on the micro scale, as a generator of affective response, and as a means of marking linguistic community. Drawing on narrative theory, philosophy of language, and affect theory, among other discourses, Strange Likeness tracks modernist attempts to describe a common world that remained open to revision and change, while arguing that reading for description can reinvigorate our thinking about the novel more broadly.