Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience

277 Pages·2015·1.496 MB·English

by  Charles Altieri

Reckoning with the Imagination

Reckoning with the
Imagination
Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics
of Literary Experience
Charles Altieri
Cornell University Press
Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University
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First published 2015 by Cornell University Press
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2015
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Altieri, Charles, 1942– author.
Reckoning with the imagination : Wittgenstein and the aesthetics of
literary experience / Charles Altieri.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-5374-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8014-5670-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1889–1951— Aesthetics. 2. Criticism.
3. Literature— History and criticism— Theory, etc. I. Title.
B3376.W564A695 2015
111'.85— dc23
2014035620
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Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cover image: Pablo Picasso, Woman Reading, 1920. © 2015 Estate of Pablo
Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Contents
Preface vii
List of Abbreviations xi
1. Why Wittgenstein Matters for Literary Theory 1
2. The Work Texts Do: Toward a Phenomenology of
Imagining Imaginatively 37
3. Where Doubt Has No Purchase: The Roles of Display 63
4. The Concept of Expression in the Arts 91
5. Expression and Exemplifi cation 130
6. What Literary Theory Can Learn from Wittgenstein’s
Silence about Ethics 159
7. Appreciating Appreciation 194
vi Contents
Notes 215
Bibliography 249
Permissions 257
Index 259
Preface
I wish this book w ere as good as the one I kept fantasizing I was writing.
It involves two worthy projects. First, I try to restate many of the arguments
by Kant, by Schiller, and by Hegel—on imagination, on aesthetic judgment,
on purposiveness, and on the relation between subject and substance—in
terms that can have some contemporary philosophical currency. These con-
cepts represent the greatest achievements of philosophical aesthetics in the
sense that they offer the richest characterizations of the differences between
art and other discourses, and they make recognizing these differences fun-
damental to understanding what the arts can contribute to our appreciation
of what we can experience. So it seems to me worth testing how they can
regain currency. This testing is especially important for literary theory be-
cause it is the arts- related discipline that has probably strayed furthest from
these idealist concerns for the nature of aesthetic experience.
Second, I base most of my efforts at reformulating these concepts on a
reading of Wittgenstein that I hope has a chance to explain to literary critics
why he can be of much greater interest for them than is currently the case.
viii Preface
So far I have failed to inspire most of my students, graduate and under-
graduate, with much passion for Wittgenstein’s texts. Now I have taken the
occasion to explain as systematically as I can why Wittgenstein’s thinking
can be vital for literary study—b oth in the development of specifi c themes
and in elaborating a general understanding of the nature of literary experi-
ence as centered on theories of expression. My Wittgenstein understands
better than any other phil oso p her how to frame the limitations of our dis-
courses about knowledge without resorting to any kind of skepticism. And
he does so by stressing the intricacy of our communications as well as the
importance of our recognizing our own powers to assent to and deploy that
intricacy. Finally I try to make Wittgenstein’s fundamentally religious sen-
sibility matter in a secular world by stressing how we can deploy the critique
of ethics this sensibility affords.
Wittgenstein also famously established the trope of discontent that I em-
ployed to open this preface. So I cannot even express dissatisfaction with
satisfying conviction. But in this case my reasons are quite a bit stronger and
more accurate than Wittgenstein’s. I have the nagging feeling that I have
not found the best ways of linking the speculative to the practical or been
suffi ciently convincing on what is possible, and impossible, to claim for the
social signifi cance of aesthetic experience. At best my arguments seem plau-
sible but not compelling. Yet I am convinced I can do no better. At my age
I have learned to be content that this book, like so much else, is not worse
than it is. And I feel the work is possibly good enough to have its arguments
provoke others to develop better ways to establish and illustrate what can be
done by returning to idealist aesthetics and by adapting Wittgenstein’s
thinking for literary theory.
Publishing this book also gives me one more opportunity to express my
gratitude for having been able to teach and to write in the environment UC
Berkeley produces. How many people can say that some of their happiest
moments have been in conducting oral exams? For these moments, and for
much else, I want to single out for gratitude my colleagues Dan Blanton,
Eric Falci, Tony Cascardi, Robert Kaufman, and Lyn Hejinian. Were I to
follow Lyn’s lead and write “My Life at Berkeley,” I would also single out
for gratitude my collegial relations with our illustrious group of poets—
Lyn, Bob Hass, Cecil Giscombe, and Geoffrey O’Brien. They have all been
gracious and helpful in discussing aspects of this book, as has Steve Gold-
smith. I also want to thank some of our young faculty such as David Marno,
Preface ix
Namwalli Serpell, Emily Thornbury, and Catharine Flynn for treating me
as if I were not an ancient relic and for the department staff for treating
me as if I w ere. I have been remiss in previous prefaces for not expressing
gratitude for a series of chairpersons in our department who have guided its
spirit and preserved suffi cient peace to get work like this done— Katharine
O’Brien O’Keefe, Sam Otter, Ian Duncan, Cathy Gallagher, Jeff Knapp,
Anne Middleton, and the most generous and caring of all, Janet Adelman,
whom we still miss a great deal.
I feel that this book in par tic u lar has been conceived largely in solitude,
in part so that I could concentrate on the excitements of thinking with and
thinking against a variety of great minds—in literature as well as in phi-
losophy. So I have been especially dependent on an extraordinary group
of graduate students who have read all or parts of this book—E dward
Alexander, Jeff Blevins, Jane Gregory, Christopher Miller, and Matt Lan-
gione. They are simply astonishing people for their intelligence and good-
will and enormous energy. Nicholas Gooding in the philosophy department
also made heroic efforts to help make this book respectable.
Beyond Berkeley I want to thank audiences at Norwich and Hartford-
shire in En gland, the University of Tennessee, UC Irvine, and the Univer-
sity of Chicago for engaging me in conversation about materials from what
would be this book. I feel even more gratitude for those who set up these
talks—D avid Nowell Smith, Danièle Moyal-S harrock, Allen Dunn, Vir-
ginia Jackson, and Richard Strier. Strier and his colleagues were especially
gracious over two days of conversation about my work.
Several editors helped shape what became chapters in this book. I am
grateful to Allen Dunn for soliciting and editing work on Alice Crary,
“The Poverty of Moral Theory in Literary Discourse: A Plea for Recogniz-
ing the Multiplicity of Value Frameworks,” Soundings 94 (2011): 35–54; to
Richard Eldridge for soliciting and for editing “Style,” in Richard Eldridge,
ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 420–41; to Richard Eldridge and Bernard Rhie for
their demanding readings of my “Cavell and Wittgenstein on Morality: The
Limits of Acknowledgement,” in their edition of Stanley Cavell and Literary
Studies: Consequences of Skepticism (New York: Continuum, 2011), 62–77; to
Garry Hagberg and Walter Jost for including my “Exemplifi cation and Ex-
pression” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), 491–506; and to Sascha Bru for collaborating with me in