Wittgenstein and Modernism
Michael LeMahieu and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé
Abstract
This book offers the first collection to address the rich, vexed, and often contradictory relationship between modernism—the twentieth century’s predominant cultural and artistic movement—and Wittgenstein, one of its preeminent and most enduring philosophers. In doing so it offers rich new understandings of both. Michael LeMahieu Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé bring together scholars in both twentieth-century philosophy and modern literary studies to put Wittgenstein into dialogue with some of modernism’s most iconic figures, including Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Walter Benjamin, Henry James, James Jo ... More
This book offers the first collection to address the rich, vexed, and often contradictory relationship between modernism—the twentieth century’s predominant cultural and artistic movement—and Wittgenstein, one of its preeminent and most enduring philosophers. In doing so it offers rich new understandings of both. Michael LeMahieu Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé bring together scholars in both twentieth-century philosophy and modern literary studies to put Wittgenstein into dialogue with some of modernism’s most iconic figures, including Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Walter Benjamin, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Adolf Loos, Robert Musil, Wallace Stevens, and Virginia Woolf. The contributors touch on two important aspects of Wittgenstein’s work and modernism itself: form and medium. They discuss issues ranging from Wittgenstein and poetics to his use of numbered propositions in the Tractatus as a virtuoso performance of modernist form; from Wittgenstein’s persistence metaphoric use of religion, music, and photography to an exploration of how he and Henry James both negotiated the relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical.
Keywords:
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
modernism,
Tractatus,
Samuel Beckett,
Saul Bellow,
Walter Benjamin,
James Joyce,
Franz Kafka,
Virginia Woolf,
Henry James
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226420370 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2017 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226420547.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Michael LeMahieu, editor
Clemson University
Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, editor
Tulane University
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