Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary by Marjorie Perloff, ISBN-13: 978-0226660608
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- Publisher: University of Chicago Press; First edition. Illustrated . (March 15, 1999)
- Language: English
- 306 pages
- ISBN-10: 0226660605
- ISBN-13: 978-0226660608
Marjorie Perloff, among our foremost critics of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Taking seriously Wittgenstein’s remark that “philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry,” Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the “poet.” What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything but banal.
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.
Table of Contents:
Illustrations
Abbreviations for Works by Wittgenstein
Preface
Introduction
1: The Making of the Tractatus: Russell, Wittgenstein, and the “Logic” of War
2: The “Synopsis of Trivialities”: The Art of the Philosophical Investigations
3: “Grammar in Use”: Wittgenstein/Gertrude Stein/Marinetti
4: Witt-Watt: The Language of Resistance/The Resistance of Language
5: Border Games: The Wittgenstein Fictions of Thomas Bernhard and Ingeborg Bachmann
6: “Running Against the Walls of Our Cage”: Toward a Wittgensteinian Poetics
Coda: “Writing Through” Wittgenstein with Joseph Kosuth
Notes
Index
Marjorie Perloff is the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University and the Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is the author of many books, including Poetics in a New Key and Unoriginal Genius, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
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