Wittgenstein's ladder
Subtitle: poetic language and the strangeness of the ordinary
By: Marjorie Perloff.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 285
Subjects: Wittgenstein, Ludwig, -- 1889-1951; Literature -- Philosophy; Criticism
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-273) and index.
Table of contents: title: The making of the Tractatus: Russell, Wittgenstein, and the "logic" of war; title: The "synopsis of trivialities": the art of the Philosophical investigations; title: "Grammar in use": Wittgenstein/Gertrude Stein/Marinetti; title: Witt-Watt: the language of resistance/the resistance of language; title: Border games: The Wittgenstein fictions of Thomas Bernhard and Ingeborg Bachmann; title: "Running against the walls of our cage": toward a Wittgensteinian poetics; title: "Writing through" Wittgenstein with Joseph Kosuth.