Wittgenstein and Modernism

Wittgenstein and Modernism is the first collection to address the rich, vexed, and often contradictory relationship between modernism, the 20th century’s predominant cultural and artistic movement, and Wittgenstein, the most preeminent and enduring philosopher of the period. Although Wittgenstein famously declared that philosophy "ought really to be written only as a form of poetry,” we have yet to fully consider how Wittgenstein’s philosophy relates to the poetic, literary, and artistic production that exemplifies the modernist era in which he lived and worked. Featuring contributions from scholars of philosophy and literature, the contributors put Wittgenstein’s writing in dialogue with work by poets and novelists (James, Woolf, Kafka, Musil, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Beckett, Bellow and Robinson) as well as philosophers and theorists (Karl Kraus, John Stuart Mill, Walter Benjamin, Michael Fried, Stanley Cavell). The volume illuminates two important aspects of Wittgenstein’s work related to modernism and postmodernism: form and medium. Each of Wittgenstein’s two major works not only advanced a revolutionary conception of philosophy, but also developed a revolutionary philosophical form to engage his readers in a mode of philosophical practice. As a whole this volume comprises an overarching argument about the importance of Wittgenstein for understanding modernism, and the importance of modernism for understanding Wittgenstein.