A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein

Citation:

Zumhagen-Yekplé, Karen. A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein. University of Chicago Press, 2020. Web.
A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein

Abstract:

Is the point of philosophy to transmit beliefs about the world, or can it sometimes have higher ambitions? In her bold new book, Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé makes an innovative literary-critical intervention into the “resolute” program of Wittgenstein scholarship, revealing that Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicusis not a theory of logic or metaphysics; it is instead a complex, mock-theoretical puzzle designed to engage readers in the therapeutic process of self-clarification he saw as the true work of philosophy. This process, she argues, has consequences more significant than anything that can be achieved by straightforward modes of instruction. Seen in this light, Wittgenstein comes to look much more like his modernist contemporaries than he might appear. Just like the literary writers of his time, Wittgenstein believes in the productive power of difficulty, in varieties of spiritual experience, in the importance of age-old questions about life’s meaning, and in the possibility of transfigurative shifts toward the right way of seeing the world. In a series of absorbing chapters, Zumhagen-Yekplé shows how Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, and Coetzee set their readers on a path toward a new way of being. Offering a new perspective on Wittgenstein as philosophical modernist, and on the lives and afterlives of his indirect teaching, A Different Order of Difficulty represents a compelling addition to studies in both literature and philosophy.

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 02/05/2021