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.

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

AUTHOR:

Marjorie Perloff is professor of English 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, most recently, Poetics in a New Key and Unoriginal Genius, also published by the University of Chicago Press.