Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction

The Language of Acknowledgment

Greg Chase

• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781839980633
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781839980657
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The early decades of the twentieth century were a period of major economic and cultural upheaval across Europe and America. Scholars have typically held that novelists responded to these shifts by questioning language's capacity to picture the world accurately. But, even as modernist novels move away from a view of language as a means of gaining knowledge, they also underscore its capacity to grant acknowledgment; they treat words as tools for recognizing and responding to the inner lives of others. This book brings out this crucial feature of modernism by engaging with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and with Stanley Cavell's pioneering interpretation of Wittgenstein's thought. The book shows how Wittgenstein's interest in acknowledgment emerges over the course of his career-long effort to grapple with the same disorienting conditions of modern life that the experimental fiction of this period registers, including world wars, industrialization, and new conceptions of sexuality. It, then, argues that modernist novels by E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, and others exhibit a similar interest in language's capacity to grant acknowledgment. These novels offer readers a way of hearing what Wittgenstein calls "the silent soliloquy of others, " giving us words by which we might acknowledge the otherwise unvoiced inner lives of socially marginalized figures.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Modernist Philosophy and Modernist Fiction
• 1. “Who’s ‘We’?”: Claims to Community in Forster’s Howards End and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
• 2. “The Silent Soliloquy of Others”: Wittgenstein’s Pursuit of Acknowledgment
• 3. “To See with the Same Eyes”: Marriage and Same-Sex Intimacy in Ford, Woolf, and Larsen
• 4. Fragmenting Families, Private Language Fantasies: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying
• 5. Seeing Humans as Humans: Wright’s Black Boy and Ellison’s Invisible Man
• Conclusion: Afterlives of Acknowledgment
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index