Modernist Fiction and Vagueness
Philosophy, Form, and Language

Modernist Fiction and Vagueness marries the artistic and philosophical versions of vagueness, linking the development of literary modernism to changes in philosophy.

Megan Quigley (Author)

9781107461154, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 25 July 2018

242 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.5 cm, 0.37 kg

'… one of the most fantastic implications of Quigley's book is that not only were early twentieth-century philosophers and writers involved in a much profounder dialogue than our intellectual histories typically admit, but that in many ways the period's philosophies of formal precision and language-based objectivity needed to be inflected through modernist art … Given the brood and convincing array of evidence Quigley amasses to prove this point, perhaps the greatest question left by Modernist Fiction and Vagueness is why few people have written anything like it before now.' Jeffrey Blevins, MAKE Literary Magazine (makemag.com)

Modernist Fiction and Vagueness marries the artistic and philosophical versions of vagueness, linking the development of literary modernism to changes in philosophy. This book argues that the problem of vagueness - language's unavoidable imprecision - led to transformations in both fiction and philosophy in the early twentieth century. Both twentieth-century philosophers and their literary counterparts (including James, Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce) were fascinated by the vagueness of words and the dream of creating a perfectly precise language. Building on recent interest in the connections between analytic philosophy, pragmatism, and modern literature, Modernist Fiction and Vagueness demonstrates that vagueness should be read not as an artistic problem but as a defining quality of modernist fiction.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: linguistic turns and literary modernism
1. 'The Re-instatement of the Vague': the James Brothers and Charles S. Peirce
2. When in December 1910?: Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and the question of vagueness
3. A dream of international precision: James Joyce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and C. K. Ogden
4. Conclusion. To criticize the criticism: T. S. Eliot and the eradication of vagueness
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy, from c 1900 - [HPCF], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]