Ludwig Wittgenstein Critical Essay | Critical Essay by James Guetti

Critical Essay by James Guetti

SOURCE: An introduction to Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Literary Experience, The University of Georgia Press, 1993, pp. 1-28.

In the following essay, Guetti attempts to determine how Wittgenstein's philosophical principles relating to the nature and function of language may be used in the analysis of "literary experience.'

"When we look into ourselves as we do in philosophy," Wittgenstein says, "we often get to see just such a picture. A full-blown pictorial representation of our grammar. Not facts; but as it were illustrated turns of speech." He was not speaking at that moment, of course, of our "introspections" in literary studies, nor were literary or "aesthetic" matters ever his first concern. But… what we get both from reading literature and from thinking about that reading, no matter how "inwardly" we think, is precisely a perception of "illustrated turns of speech," and it is a perception so powerful that we mistake...
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