The early decades of the twentieth century were a period of major economic and cultural upheaval across Europe and America. Scholars have typically held that novelists responded to these shifts by questioning language’s capacity to picture the world accurately. But, even as modernist novels move away from a view of language as a means of gaining knowledge, they also underscore its capacity to grant acknowledgment; they treat words as tools for recognizing and responding to the inner lives of others. This book brings out this crucial feature of modernism by engaging with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as with Stanley Cavell’s pioneering interpretation of Wittgenstein’s thought.
Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction: The Language of Acknowledgment shows how Wittgenstein’s interest in acknowledgment emerges over the course of his career-long effort to grapple with the same disorienting conditions of modern life that the experimental fiction of this period registers, including world war, industrialization, and new conceptions of sexuality. It then argues that modernist novels by E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison exhibit a similar interest in language’s capacity to grant acknowledgment. These novels offer readers a way of hearing what Wittgenstein calls “the silent soliloquy of others,” giving us words by which we might acknowledge the otherwise unvoiced inner lives of socially marginalized figures.