Rövid leírás:
Fictions of Fact and Value looks at logical positivism’s major influence on the development of postwar American fiction, charting a literary and philosophical genealogy that has been absent from criticism on the American novel since 1945.
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Hosszú leírás:
Fictions of Fact and Value argues that the philosophy of logical positivism, considered the antithesis of literary postmodernism, exerts a determining influence on the development of American fiction in the three decades following 1945. Two particular postwar literary preoccupations derive from logical positivist philosophy: the fact/value problem and the correlative distinction between sense and nonsense. Even as postwar writers responded to logical positivism as a threat to the imagination, their works often manifest its influence, specifically with regard to ’emotive’ or ‘meaningless’ terms. Far from a straightforward history of ideas, Michael LeMahieu charts a genealogy that is often erased in the very texts where it registers and disowned by the very authors that it includes. Reading works by John Barth, Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo, Iris Murdoch, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Pynchon, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Fictions of Fact and Value will interest anyone concerned with postmodernism, modernist studies, analytic philosophy, or the history of ideas.
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Tartalomjegyzék:
Introduction
„Postwar Fiction, the Fact/Value Problem, and the Literary Response to Logical Positivism”
Chapter One
„Indigestible Residues”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Aesthetic Negativism, and the Incompleteness of Logical Positivism
Chapter Two
„Negative Appearance”
Flannery O’Connor, the Fact/Value Problem, and the Threat of Logical Positivism
Chapter Three
„Contradictory Feelings”
John Barth, Non-Mystical Value-Thinking, and the Exhaustion of Logical Positivism
Chapter Four
„Eternal Things”
Saul Bellow, the Infinite Longings of the Soul, and the Shortcomings of Logical Positivism
Chapter Five
„Illogical Negativism”
Thomas Pynchon, the Critique of Modernism, and the Erasure of Logical Positivism
