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

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.

List of contents

• Introduction: Overlooked and Underfelt: Reading in Earnest


• 1: The General, The Particular, and the Art of the Commonplace


• 2: A Novel Concerning Human Understanding: Middlemarch and the Philosophical Commonplace


• 3: When we feel the truth of a commonplace": Form and Inflection in Eliot and Wittgenstein


• 4: The Spirit of the Commonplace, or When does it make sense to use the word "soul"?


• Coda: On Literature, Philosophy, and Undisciplined Reading

About the author

Nancy Yousef is Professor of English at Rutgers University. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections between philosophical writing and literary form, and especially on the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and the representation of emotions. A recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Humanities Center, she is the author of Romantic Intimacy (2013, winner of the Barricelli Prize) and Isolated Cases (2004), as well as essays on Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Dickens.

Summary

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.

Additional text

Nancy Yousef's The Aesthetic Commonplace sensitively and skilfully brings together William Wordsworth, George Eliot and Ludwig Wittgenstein as united by a common 'appeal' - an urgent call to pay attention to everyday language as a subject not merely overlooked, but as bearing ethical weight.

Product details

• Authors: Nancy Yousef, Nancy (Professor of English Yousef, Yousef Nancy
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.04.2022
• EAN: 9780192856524
• ISBN: 978-0-19-285652-4
• No. of pages: 212
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; PHILOSOPHY / History & Surveys / Modern, LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: poetry & poets, Western philosophy: c 1600 to c 1900, Philosophical traditions and schools of thought, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: poetry and poets