The Aesthetic Commonplace : Wordsworth, Eliot, Wittgenstein, and the Language of Every Day

The Aesthetic Commonplace is a study of the everyday as a region of overlooked value in the work of William Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Romantic poet, the realist novelist, and the modern philosopher are each separately associated with a commitment to the common, the ordinary, and the everyday as a vital resource for reflection on language, on feeling, on ethical insight, and social attunement. The Aesthetic Commonplace is the first study to draw substantive lines of connection between Wittgenstein and the cultural and literary history of nineteenth century England. Tracing conceptual and formal affinities between the poet, the novelist, and the philosopher, the book brings to light significant links between the intellectual history of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, making the case for a continuous cultural commitment to the aesthetic as a distinctive mode of investigating thought, feeling, and the everyday language upon which we depend for their articulation. Addressed to both literary studies and to philosophy, The Aesthetic Commonplace makes a compelling case for the interdependence of form, concept, and emotion in the history and interpretive practices of both disciplines. Cover The Aesthetic Commonplace: Wordsworth, Eliot, Wittgenstein and the Language of Every Day Copyright Dedication Acknowledgments Table of Contents List of Figures Introduction: Overlooked and Underfelt: Reading in Earnest Literature, Philosophy, and the Region of the Commonplace; or, at Home with Wittgenstein . . . in England Wittgenstein’s Marginality: An Excursus “I am aiming at something different”: Wittgenstein’s Dissent Staying Interested: Interpretation and Self-implication 1: The General, the Particular, and the Art of the Commonplace On Non-conceptualArt Family Photos Leaves, Trees and Water Towers Cheap Common Things, Old Women, Philosophers The Commonplace and the Memorable 2: A Novel Concerning Human Understanding: Middlemarch and the Philosophical Commonplace “The Future of Philosophy”?: Between Eliot and Wittgenstein Extraordinary Insight? “. . . of which the other knew nothing”: A Philosophical Commonplace Middlemarch Un-Locked “Remarkably like the portrait of Locke” “A picture held us captive” The right answers to the wrong questions 3: “When we feel the truth of a commonplace”: Form and Inflection in Eliot and Wittgenstein A Woman is Crying “Something about which nothing can be said”: Inwardness as Exclamation Middlemarch Unguided: Expecting a Response Without Formulating a Question What she knows when he says “my love” Excursus: On a “little speech of four words” 4: The Spirit of the Commonplace, or When does it make sense to use the word “soul”? Taking Note Poetry Incarnate Making Sense of Soul: “Of course I understand it!” “I would like to be deep . . . yet I shy away from the abyss in the human heart!” “Commonplace and even trite,” or “interesting and important”? “Upon my soul” and “in my heart” Coda: On Literature, Philosophy, and Undisciplined Reading “. . . all that is great and important . . .” Eliot and the Art-workof Emotion “The River Between,” or, Where Cavell Stands Literary and Philosophical Concurrence Bibliography Index Index of Passages Cited from Philosophical Investigations A study of the notion of the everyday in the work of William Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Ludwig Wittgenstein that explores the interdependence of expressive form and the conceptualization or framing of questions about thinking, feeling, and communicating.