Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience

Charles Altieri

Published by Cornell University Press 2016

Reckoning with the Imagination

Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience

Charles Altieri

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501700552

Overview
Contents

About this book

Charles Altieri argues for a reconsideration of the Kantian tradition of Idealist ethics, which he believes can restore much of the power of the arguments for the role of aesthetics in art.

Author / Editor information

Charles Altieri is Stageberg Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of many books, including Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value and The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects, both from Cornell, and Postmodernisms Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts.

Reviews

David Mikics, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English, University of Houston, author of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age:

Charles Altieri is one of our foremost literary/philosophical theorists and critics of poetry, and anything he writes commands attention. He is a master of these realms and a fine-tuned reader in the disciplines he knows so well. Reckoning with the Imagination is a rigorous and impressive book.

Alan Singer, author of The Self-Deceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art:

Charles Altieri has written a book about the social uses of literature that doesn't foreclose the power of aesthetic engagements to transfigure particular lives, especially with respect to possibilities of self-understanding that mere sociality cannot confer and, even more importantly, with respect to the sensuous intensities that society cannot harness. Altieri restores to our investments in the aesthetic a power of appreciation for human worldliness that has long been absent from literary criticism—to the detriment of literature and life.

Henry Staten, University of Washington:

Charles Altieri has long been our most philosophical, and yet most impassioned, critic and theorist of poetry, for whom lyric poems are heroic 'acts of mind' that criticize illusion and empower the reader 'to will what the intellect sees,' while yet marrying this activity to 'lively affective intensities.' In this new book, he shows, with the assistance of Wittgenstein, how notions like imagination, feeling, attunement, and appreciation can be given a viable, post-Romantic sense adequate to the fullness of the experience of poetry.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Chapter 1. Why Wittgenstein Matters for Literary Theory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 2. The Work Texts Do Toward a Phenomenology of Imagining Imaginatively Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	37
Chapter 3. Where Doubt Has No Purchase The Roles of Display Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
Chapter 4. The Concept of Expression in the Arts Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
Chapter 5. Expression and Exemplification Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	130
Chapter 6. What Literary Theory Can Learn from Wittgenstein’s Silence about Ethics Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Chapter 7. Appreciating Appreciation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	194
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249
Permission to reprint has been granted by the following Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	259

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 280
Keywords: Aesthetic values in reading; literary texts in the social world; imagination; Enlightenment thinking; the art of appreciation; aesthetic experience

eBook

Published: February 19, 2016
ISBN: 9781501700552