Table Of ContentWittgenstein 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
