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Austere and uncompromising, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had no use for the avant-garde art works of his own time. He refused to formulate an aesthetic, declaring that one can no more define the "beautiful" than determine "what sort of coffee tastes good." And yet many of the writers of our time have understood, as academic theorists generally have not, that Wittgenstein is "their" philosopher. How do we resolve this paradox?
Marjorie Perloff, our foremost critic of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Wittgenstein has provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language.
Wittgenstein's ladder is an apt figure for this radical aesthetic, and not just in its ordinariness as an object. The movement "up" this ladder can never be more than what Wittgenstein's contemporary, Gertrude Stein, called "Beginning again and again." Wittgenstein shows us, too, that we cannot climb the same ladder twice: the use of language, the context in which words and sentences appear, defines their meaning, which changes with every repetition.
Wittgenstein's aesthetic brooks no theory, no essentialism, no metalanguage - only a practice, a mode of operation, fragmentary and elliptical.
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1
Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary
March 15, 1999, University Of Chicago Press
Paperback
in English
0226660605 9780226660608
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2
Wittgenstein's ladder: poetic language and the strangeness of the ordinary
1996, University of Chicago Press
in English
0226660583 9780226660585
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3
Wittgenstein's ladder: poetic language and the strangeness of the ordinary
1996, University of Chicago Press
in English
0226660583 9780226660585
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Libraries near you:
WorldCat
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Book Details
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"In the autumn of 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his young Cambridge student and friend Norman Malcolm were walking along the river when they saw a newspaper vendor's sign announcing that the Germans had accused the British government of instigating a recent attempt to assassinate Hitler."
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- Created April 30, 2008
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October 10, 2020 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
August 4, 2020 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
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April 24, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs. |
April 30, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |