An Agreement with Reality:The Poetry of Logical Modernism.

Poetry;Poetics;Modernism;Logic;Logical Modernism;Gertrude Stein;Wallace Stevens;Ludwig Wittgenstein;Bertrand Russell;Romanticism;Laura (Riding) Jackson;John Keats;Transatlantic Modernism;Analytic Philosophy;Kant;Literary Truth;Literary Fact;Stanzas in Meditation;Beauty Is Truth;Truth Beauty;EsthéTique Du Mal;Aesthetics;Aesthetic Theory;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English Language and Literature

Porte, Rebecca ArielWhite, Gillian Cahill ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Poetry;    Poetics;    Modernism;    Logic;    Logical Modernism;    Gertrude Stein;    Wallace Stevens;    Ludwig Wittgenstein;    Bertrand Russell;    Romanticism;    Laura (Riding) Jackson;    John Keats;    Transatlantic Modernism;    Analytic Philosophy;    Kant;    Literary Truth;    Literary Fact;    Stanzas in Meditation;    Beauty Is Truth;    Truth Beauty;    EsthéTique Du Mal;    Aesthetics;    Aesthetic Theory;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English Language and Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/109047/raporte_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In the early twentieth century, the nascent analytic philosophy turned away from idealism and towards a distinctively modern realism. An Agreement with Reality contends that modern, Transatlantic poetry can and should be read in that context. This dissertation concatenates rarely juxtaposed poets, critics and philosophers, delineating a logical modernism defined by three criteria: 1) preoccupation with the nature of literary truth and literary fact where truth is defined as ;;agreement with reality,” 2) poetic engagement with Neo-Kantian aesthetic philosophy, and 3) anxieties about making, mourning, or dismantling a comprehensive theory of everything that would reconcile the truths of aesthetic discourses with those of science and philosophy. Reading William Empson, Laura (Riding) Jackson, I.A. Richards, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens in conjunction with Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, I show how logical modernism acts as a complex of epistemic virtues informing the interpretation and production of modern poetry. I challenge the truism that Continental and pragmatist strains of schools of thought are the only species of philosophy relevant to literary studies and also reveal under-theorized points of continuity between Romantic and modern aesthetics. Chapter One considers early close readers’ responses to the finale of Keats’s ;;Ode on a Grecian Urn,” ;;Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Concerns about how these lines agree with reality expose modern close reading’s self-fashioning use of the terms of logical discourse, anxieties resurrected in contemporary criticism by Franco Moretti’s ;;distant reading.” Stein’s mediation between pragmatist and logical agreements with reality occupies Chapter Two. I concentrate on two poetic sequences, I Can Feel The Beauty and the ;;long dull poem” Stanzas in Meditation, contending that Stein employs linked strategies of multiple reference and naming without naming to unsettle the concept of literary fact. Chapter Three examines Stevens’s formulation of poetry as ;;an agreement with reality brought about by the imagination,” reflecting on the ;;bad aesthetics” of a long poem called Esthétique du Mal in which poetry acts as elegy for a theory of everything. Employing archival and theoretical frameworks, I offer a cultural history of, in Susan Howe’s words, the ;;secret affinity” between logic and poetry.