Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Wittgenstein and some German novelists

I linked in my previous post to some items that connect Wittgenstein to literary themes.

Duncan Richter has a post about Wittgenstein and Kafka. In the comments to that post, there are recommendations of some additional work that involves Kafka and Wittgenstein. Richter refers to Rebecca Schuman's paper, ‘"Unerschütterlich": Kafka’s Proceß, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and the Law of Logic', which has now appeared in The German Quarterly. I know of one fictional work that puts Kafka and Wittgenstein together (very briefly). It's a story by Guy Davenport called The Aeroplanes at Brescia.

Last fall, Ben Ware published 'Ethics and the Literary in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' in the Journal for the History of Ideas. Ware there 'explores the connections between the literary and the ethical in the book,' and argues that 'Wittgenstein hoped to achieve a practical rather than cognitive transformation in his readers' lives.'

On another German lit front that involves Wittgenstein, Gwyneth Cliver's 2008 dissertation, Musil, Broch, and the mathematics of modernism, has two chapters on Wittgenstein.

4 comments:

R. Adler said...

I believe that Karen Zumhagen-Yekple has another article on Kafka and Wittgenstein forthcoming in Comparative Literature. She is also working on a book that deals with Wittgenstein and literary modernist writers.

schuman ohne eigenschaften said...

Thank you very much for referencing my paper on your really neat blog. I really appreciate it, and I hope that the resurgent interest in Wittgenstein and literature that seems to be happening keeps happening! -Rebecca Schuman

Anonymous said...

Good stuff Paul pulling this secondary literature together. Thanks - I'm going to follow them up. Cheers - MWQ

praymont said...

No problem, MWQ. Thanks, RA, for that reference. These sources do look interesting. I look forward to reading your paper, SOE, if I ever get out from under all my grading.