Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism

In the last half-century Ludwig Wittgenstein's relevance beyond analytic philosophy, to continental philosophy, to cultural studies, and to the arts has been widely acknowledged.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus was published in 1922 – the annus mirabilis of modernism – alongside Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's The Waste Land, Mansfield's The Garden Party and Woolf's Jacob's Room. Bertolt Brecht's first play to be produced, Drums in the Night, was first staged in 1922, as was Jean Cocteau's Antigone, with settings by Pablo Picasso and music by Arthur Honegger. In different ways, all these modernist landmarks dealt with the crisis of representation and the demise of eternal metaphysical and ethical truths. The Tractatus both expresses and defines this crisis. By the end of the 1920s, Wittgenstein started questioning the picture presented in his Tractatus. In his later philosophy he adopted a rich philosophical language, imbued with metaphors, similes and examples, and attentive to the practical and ordinary uses of language. If the gist of modernism is self-reflection and attention to the way form expresses content, then Wittgenstein's later ideas-in their fragmented form as well as their “ear-opening” contents-deliver it most precisely.

Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism shows Wittgenstein's work, both early and late, to be closely linked to the modernist Geist that prevailed during his lifetime. It exposes the intricate ways in which Wittgenstein's ideas echo in contemporaneous philosophical and artistic works and analyzes their uniqueness, on the one hand, and their characteristic modernism, as it reflects in these works, on the other. Arguing for the above claims, its purpose is to show Wittgenstein's oeuvre as the utmost manifestation of modernist presuppositions.

Introduction: Wittgenstein and Modernism: Reading Slowly
Anat Matar (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
Part I – Conceptualizing Wittgenstein
Language, Expressibility and the Mystical
John Skorupski (University of St. Andrews, UK)
Modernism and Rigor
Juliet Floyd (Boston University, USA)
Wittgenstein, Phenomenology and the appeal to Everyday Experience
Oskari Kuusela (University of East-Anglia, UK)
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty: Faux Amis?
Daniele Moyal-Sharrock (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language Philosophy
Hans-Johann Glock (University of Zurick, Switzerland)
Part II – Wittgenstein and Aesthetics
Wittgenstein and Modernist Literature and Music
Ray Monk (University of Southampton, UK)
Wittgenstein, Musil and Modernity: the Problem of Just Life
Pierre Fasula (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France)
Proust, Wittgenstein and Solipsism
Elise Marrou (École normale supérieure, Paris, Sorbonne Paris-IV and the Institut catholique de Paris, France)
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Self-Consciousness, and the Emergence of a Modernist Sensibility in Henry James
Garry Hagberg (Bard College, USA)
The Sound of Moving Forms in Philosophy
Antonia Soulez (University Paris-8 St. Denis, France)
Wittgenstein, Benjamin and Loos
Eli Friedlander (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
Wittgenstein's Home
David Schalkwyk (Queen Mary, University of London and the University of Warwick, UK)
Part III – Glossary

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