Wittgenstein and modernism PDF
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Wittgenstein and Modernism Wittgenstein and Modernism Edited by Michael LeMahieu and Karen Zumhagen- Yekplé The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2017. Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 42037- 0 (cloth) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 42040- 0 (paper) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 42054- 7 (e- book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226420547.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: LeMahieu, Michael, author, editor. | Zumhagen- Yekplé, Karen, author, editor. Title: Wittgenstein and modernism / edited by Michael LeMahieu and Karen Zumhagen- Yekplé. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016017326 | ISBN 9780226420370 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226420400 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226420547 (e- book) Subjects: LCSH: Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. | Modernism (Literature) Classification: LCC B3376.W564 W54325 2016 | DDC 192—dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2016017326 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Wittgenstein, Modernism, and the Contradictions of Writing Philosophy as Poetry 1 Michael LeMahieu and Karen Zumhagen- Yekplé Part 1 Wittgenstein’s Modernist Context 1 Wittgenstein and Modernism in Literature: Between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations 23 Anthony J. Cascardi 2 “To Become a Different Person”: Wittgenstein, Christianity, and the Modernist Ethos 41 Marjorie Perloff 3 The Concept of Expression in the Arts from a Wittgensteinian Perspective 57 Charles Altieri 4 Wittgenstein, Loos, and Critical Modernism: Style and Idea in Architecture and Philosophy 71 Allan Janik Part 2 Wittgenstein’s Modernist Cultures 5 Loos, Musil, Wittgenstein, and the Recovery of Human Life 91 Piergiorgio Donatelli 6 Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Pure Realism 114 Eli Friedlander 7 What Makes a Poem Philosophical? 130 John Gibson vi contents Part 3 Wittgenstein and Literary Modernism 8 In the Condition of Modernism: Philosophy, Literature, and The Sacred Fount 153 Kristin Boyce 9 The World as Bloom Found It: “Ithaca,” the Tractatus, and “Looking More than Once for the Solution of Difficult Problems in Imaginary or Real Life” 176 Karen Zumhagen- Yekplé 10 Lectures on Ethics: Wittgenstein and Kafka 206 Yi- Ping Ong 11 Bellow’s Private Language 231 Michael LeMahieu Notes 255 List of Contributors 289 Index 293 Acknowledgments We would like to express our deepest thanks to Elizabeth Branch Dyson, whose early commitment to this project saw it through to its completion. We also wish to thank the four anonymous referees whose careful reading of the proposal and the manuscript provided valuable guidance. We are grate- ful for the support of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University and the Department of English and the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities at Clemson University. Introduction Wittgenstein, Modernism, and the Contradictions of Writing Philosophy as Poetry Michael LeMahieu and Karen Zumhagen- Yekplé How does the category of modernism inform our understanding of Wittgen- stein’s philosophy, and how does Wittgenstein’s philosophy elucidate the cate- gory of modernism? The essays in this volume take up these questions as they consider how different aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy intersect with various uses of the term “modernism.” Wittgenstein’s philosophy enacts or embodies, alternately or simultaneously, modernism as a historical period, an aesthetic style, and a philosophical worldview. Yet even as the concept of mod- ernism affords new understandings of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Wittgen- stein’s multifaceted thinking raises the vexing question of modernism itself. On the face of it, Wittgenstein appears to represent a modernist figure par excellence— the philosophical counterpart to poets, artists, and composers the likes of Stein, Picasso, and Schoenberg. Wittgenstein’s lifespan, 1889– 1951, coincides almost perfectly with modernism’s “core period of about 1890 to 1945.”1 The one major work he published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, appeared in its influential English translation in 1922, modern- ism’s annus mirabilis: the year of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.2 As those works revolutionized literature, the Tracta- tus revolutionized philosophy, advancing the most crystalline statement of the linguistic turn in twentieth- century thought.3 The Tractatus “secretly belongs,” Terry Eagleton suggests, to “the great wave of European modern- ism”: “For the true coordinates of that astonishing mystical text are surely not Russell or Frege, but Joyce, Schoenberg, Picasso, all those self- ironising avant- gardists who sought in their own fashion to represent and point to their representing at a stroke.”4 After abandoning and then returning to philosophy, Wittgenstein went on to revolutionize the field a second time. The posthu- mous publication of the Philosophical Investigations in 1953 set the stage for
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