Fictions of Fact and Value
Subtitle: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1945-1975
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780199890408
Subjects: American fiction, history and criticism, 20th century; Logical positivism
Description: "Fictions of Fact and Value argues that the philosophy of logical positivism, considered the antithesis of literary postmodernism, exerts a determining influence on the development of American fiction in the three decades following 1945, in what amounts to a constitutive encounter between literature and philosophy at mid-century: after the end of modernism, as it was traditionally conceived, but prior to the rise of postmodernism, as it came to be known. Two particular postwar literary preoccupations derive from logical positivist philosophy: the fact/value problem and the correlative distinction between sense and nonsense. Even as postwar writers responded to logical positivism as a threat to the imagination, their works often manifest its influence, specifically with regard to " terms. Far from a straightforward history of ideas, Fictions of Fact and Value charts a genealogy that is often erased in the very texts where it registers and disowned by the very authors that it includes." -- Publisher website.