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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Wittgenstein As A Modernist Philosopher, Michael Fischer
Wittgenstein As A Modernist Philosopher, Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
Much attention has recently been given to Martin Heidegger and his disturbing relationship to fascism. I want here to look at another philosopher in this context: Ludwig Wittgenstein. As a source of insight into the politics of modernism, Wittgenstein would seem to have at least three strikes against him. His explicit political pronouncements are rare; his relationship to literary modernism is unclear; and the political implications of his philosophical writings are notoriously difficult to assess. Perhaps for these reasons, discussions of modernism usually omit Wittgenstein, and discussions of Wittgenstein usually ignore modernism. Stanley Cavell is an important exception to this …
Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, And The Ethics Of Understanding [Review], Michael Fischer
Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, And The Ethics Of Understanding [Review], Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
We are still trying to sort out the complex legacy of romanticism. "We" here includes philosophers Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty, feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and a remarkable variety of literary theorists, from Northrop Frye, M. H. Abrams, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom through Hazard Adams and Jerome J. McGann. Julie Ellison's important book, Delicate Subjects, focuses on an especially difficult problem we have inherited from the romantics: the problem of defining the ethics of interpretation. According to Ellison, male romantic writers worry that in literary interpretation, we murder to dissect (to paraphrase Wordsworth). Criticism, from …