Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary Paperback – March 15, 1999

What Wittgenstein says is said again as it refers to its unconnected referents created in the ambiguity and aimlessness of the struggle to make without grandiose stat meets the conditions of contemporary thought. This book can only show the art coaxed out of the philosopher’s works, in the spirit(sic) of the Investigations. A great read.

Item as described and shipped quickly! Thanks!

Most informative and profound

Wittgenstein wrote with some of the compression of great poetry but I'm not sure Perloff convinces that he and Gertrude Stein have much to say to each other. Beckett maybe. But some of Perloff's applications of Wittgenstein seemed stretched thin to make the point that we need philosopher as our patron saint of difficulty. W. probably would have preferred Tennyson to Beckett any day.

Excellent. Perfect

wonderful book

i've been consistently disappoint with perloff: her writing merely confirms the opinion one might hold after a first reading. these are not extraodinary thoughts if you please. in term of ladder drill's deleuzian musings (poor fellow, procrastinating grad student) perhaps uni and bivalence should be replaced by wittgenstein's own contextual emphasis: a polyvalence which exists fully in pragmatic usage but is institutionalized (territorialized) as stagnant grammatical catergories, which 'poetic' usage then transgresses (master-slave, deterritorialization whatever). in terms of repetition and institutionalization, i think any serious thinking through poetic site needs a more thorough model of meaning/signification that acknowledges speech, where reiteration is polyvalent simultaneously with its capacity for univalent recognition within official discourses. whether we'd like to think this through with simple shifters, wittgenstein's pattern of substitution, or a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is your choice... the simplification of communication/language/speech/whatever into ordinary/poetic doesn't even start to do the question justice.(as some people's idiolectical adoption testifies to quite nicely) cheers.

This is an engaging, down-to-earth book about the connections between Wittgenstein's aphoristic philosophy and some of the 20th-century writers who've followed his lead up the 'ladder of the ordinary.' Perloff's at her best with the close readings of difficult writers like Stein, Beckett and Creeley, who magically flower into comprehensibility under her sharp attention and good sense.The authors she chooses to illustrate Wittgenstein's influence seemed a little arbitrary to me though. She admits that Beckett and Stein didn't read Wittgenstein, and that Wittgenstein would probably have disliked their art. So why put them 'under his sign'? It makes more sense to me to see Wittgenstein as part of a wider generation who felt dissatisfied with the pre-war language they'd inherited. With later poets like Silliman and Waldrop, who explicitly cite Wittgenstein's writings as an inspiration, I think Perloff misses what separates them from Wittgenstein: he had no earlier model to cite. Wittgenstein's faith in ordinary language led to a manner of writing and thinking that was largely self-sufficient--an interested reader can dive right in and think through the problems for herself. His more allusive postmodern heirs rely to a large extent on your prior knowledge of texts like Wittgenstein's for their effects. Where Wittgenstein himself struggled to keep his religious and hierarchical values in check through the discipline of ordinary language--concepts like beauty, God and the self seemed to have some meaning for him, you just couldn't talk about those meanings with language--later writers' easy acceptance of notions like a language game, the 'constructed self' and the fundamental indeterminacy of language seems to drain some of the drama from their writing. You don't feel the same struggle (or modesty) that you sense in Wittgenstein's open, user-friendly illustrations. Describing one of his poems, Ron Silliman writes: "Every sentence is supposed to remind the reader of his or her inability to respond." I can't imagine Wittgenstein saying something like that.Still, the book is an interesting take on Wittgenstein and the poetic he unwittingly inspired. Well worth reading.

-