The Aesthetic Commonplace Wordsworth, Eliot, Wittgenstein, and the Language of Every Day

The Aesthetic Commonplace is a study of the everyday as a region of overlooked value in the work of William Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Romantic poet, the realist novelist, and the modern philosopher are each separately associated with a commitment to the common, the ordinary, and the everyday as a vital resource for reflection on language, on feeling, on ethical insight, and social attunement. The Aesthetic Commonplace is the first study to draw substantive lines of connection between Wittgenstein and the cultural and literary history of nineteenth century England. Tracing conceptual and formal affinities between the poet, the novelist, and the philosopher, the book brings to light significant links between the intellectual history of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, making the case for a continuous cultural commitment to the aesthetic as a distinctive mode of investigating thought, feeling, and the everyday language upon which we depend for their articulation. Addressed to both literary studies and to philosophy, The Aesthetic Commonplace makes a compelling case for the interdependence of form, concept, and emotion in the history and interpretive practices of both disciplines.

Nancy Yousef, Professor of English, Rutgers University

Nancy Yousef is Professor of English at Rutgers University. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections between philosophical writing and literary form, and especially on the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and the representation of emotions. A recipient of fellowships from the American
Council of Learned Societies and the National Humanities Center, she is the author of Romantic Intimacy (2013, winner of the Barricelli Prize) and Isolated Cases (2004), as well as essays on Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Dickens.

Introduction: Overlooked and Underfelt: Reading in Earnest
1. The General, The Particular, and the Art of the Commonplace
2. A Novel Concerning Human Understanding: Middlemarch and the Philosophical Commonplace
3. When we feel the truth of a commonplace": Form and Inflection in Eliot and Wittgenstein
4. The Spirit of the Commonplace, or When does it make sense to use the word "soul"?
Coda: On Literature, Philosophy, and Undisciplined Reading