Difficulty, ethical teaching, and the yearning for transformation in Wittgenstein's Tractatus and twentieth-century literature -- Wittgenstein's puzzle: the transformative ethics of the Tractatus -- The everyday's fabulous beyond: nonsense, parable, and the ethics of the literary in Kafka and Wittgenstein -- Woolf, Diamond, and the difficulty of reality -- Wittgenstein, Joyce, and the vanishing problem of life -- A new life is a new life: teaching and transformation in Coetzee's Childhood of Jesus.
Summary:
"This innovative critical study reinterprets Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy for the study of modernist and contemporary literature and brings Wittgenstein into literary conversations around problems of difficulty, ethical instruction, and the yearning for transformation. Central to Karen Zumhagen-Yekple͹'s book are her critical readings of key modernist texts by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Throughout, Zumhagen-Yekplé brings to bear an interpretive framework that she derives from Wittgenstein's gnomic "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" (first published in English in 1922, the "annus mirabilis" of modernism), which she treats not as a theory of logic or metaphysics but as a complex mock-theoretical puzzle. The book's final chapter turns to recent fiction by J. M. Coetzee, a living author conscious of his debts both to Wittgenstein and his modernist literary precursors. This book will interest students of literary modernism, Wittgenstein, and the interconnections between fiction and ordinary language philosophy"-- Provided by publisher.
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