Matter of High Words - Naturalism, Normativity, and the Postwar Sage

In a world of matter, how can we express what matters? This book examines a constellation of post-WWII authors who pose this question through both art and argument. Seeking to dramatize our highest words, these postwar sages raise essential questions about meaning, language, science, and modernity.

List of contents

• Introduction


• Part One: Words and Flesh


• Chapter 1: Minds, Machines, and Giving a Damn


• Chapter 2: That Horeb, That Kansas


• Part Two: We Solemnly Publish and Declare


• Chapter 3: Sociology to the Scientists


• Chapter 4: Puzzles, Pawnshops, and Improvisation


• Chapter 5: The Advanced US Citizenship of David Foster Wallace


• Afterward


• Bibliography

About the author

Robert Chodat is an Associate Professor of English at Boston University, where he specializes in post-WWII American fiction and the relationship between literature and philosophy. He is the author of Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo (2008).

Summary

In a world of matter, how can we express what matters? This book examines a constellation of post-WWII authors who pose this question through both art and argument. Seeking to dramatize our highest words, these postwar sages raise essential questions about meaning, language, science, and modernity.

Additional text

For those working in the humanities and social sciences who have felt compelled to question the pervasive consensus that 'high ideas' - abstract concepts and values - can only distort and injure; that beings and environments to which we apply such ideas are fundamentally unrepresentable much less knowable; and that such ideas are therefore illegitimate bases for human action, both individual and collective, Robert Chodat's new book should offer a welcome tonic...This book delivers a powerful challenge to the prevailing theoretical commitments of nearly six decades of literary scholarship.

Product details

• Authors: Robert Chodat, Robert (Associate Professor of English Chodat, Chodat Robert
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.10.2017
• EAN: 9780190682156
• ISBN: 978-0-19-068215-6
• No. of pages: 360
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Philosophy: general, reference works; PHILOSOPHY / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 21st Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Literary studies: post-colonial literature, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: postcolonial literature