Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
Wittgenstein's Ladder - Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary - cover

Wittgenstein's Ladder - Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary

Marjorie Perloff

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

“[Perloff] has brilliantly adapted Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning and use to an analysis of contemporary language poetry.” —Linda Voris, Boston Review 
 
Marjorie Perloff, among our foremost critics of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Taking seriously Wittgenstein’s remark that “philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry,” Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the “poet.” What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything but banal. 
 
“This book has the lucidity and the intelligence we have come to expect from Marjorie Perloff.” —Linda Munk, American Literature 
 
“Wittgenstein’s Ladder offers significant insights into the current state of poetry, literature, and literary study. Perloff emphasizes the vitality of reading and thinking about poetry, and the absolute necessity of pushing against the boundaries that define and limit our worlds.” —David Clippinger, Chicago Review 
 
“Majorie Perloff has done more to illuminate our understanding of twentieth century poetic language than perhaps any other critic . . . Entertaining, witty, and above all highly original.” —Willard Bohn, SubStance
Available since: 06/12/2012.
Print length: 308 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • Hail the Invisible Watchman - cover

    Hail the Invisible Watchman

    Alexandra Oliver

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Hail, The Invisible Watchman is haunted poetry—Oliver’s formal schemes are as tidy as a picket-fence and as suggestive; behind the charm of rhyme is a vibrant, dark exploration of domestic and social alienation.
    		 
    The poems in Hail, the Invisible Watchman are as tidy as a picket-fence—and as suggestive. Behind the charms of iambs lurks a dark exploration of domestic and social alienation. Metered rhyme sets the tone like a chilling piano score as insidiousness creeps into the neighbourhood. A spectral narrator surveils social gatherings in the town of Sherbet Lake; community members chime in, each revealing their various troubles and hypocrisies; an eerie reimagining of an Ethel Wilson novel follows a young woman into a taboo friendship with an enigmatic divorcée. In taut poetic structures across three succinct sections, Alexandra Oliver’s conflation of the mundane and the phantasmagoric produces a scintillating portrait of the suburban uncanny.
    Show book
  • Echoes (NHB Modern Plays) - cover

    Echoes (NHB Modern Plays)

    Henry Naylor

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Two British women, 175 years apart. One is a bright, Islamist schoolgirl; the other a Victorian colonial pioneer. The former would build a caliphate; the latter an Empire. Both are idealists; intelligent adventurers, with strong religious beliefs. Both are frustrated by societies which offer them few opportunities. And both would travel to the East, to impose their ideals upon unwilling peoples…
    Echoes is a bloody tale of colonialism – ancient and modern – and the rhyme of history. It is part of the Arabian Nightmares trilogy. It was first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2015, transferring to the Arcola Theatre, London, later that year.
    'Henry Naylor might be a bit of a genius... [He] uses language in an exquisite way, which always feels natural in the character's mouth. Some feat. The writing is evocative and full of imagery, yet sparse enough not to overload us and give us enough time to comprehend the storylines... This is a clever and subtly nuanced piece that examines the plight of women across time, through the lenses of sexual inequality, religious duty and betrayal.' - Broadway Baby
    'A dark and daring look at colonial cruelty... hugely impressive' - Guardian
    'Superbly written … a must see' - Sunday Times
    Show book
  • Life is a Dream - Full Text and Introduction (NHB Drama Classics) - cover

    Life is a Dream - Full Text and...

    Pedro Calderón

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding.
    
    Life is a Dream is considered a masterpiece of the Spanish Golden Age.
    
    
    It is foretold that Prince Sigismund will become a tyrant. Alarmed, his father, the king, imprisons him. When he is released for a day as an experiment he proves the omens only too right, and, as a result, is incarcerated once more. Sigismund persuades himself that all that has passed is a dream and emerges to rule wisely and justly.
    
    
    'the star of the festival -- John Clifford's translation reclaims a Spanish masterpiece for the modern stage' - Guardian
    Show book
  • Match - cover

    Match

    River Halen Guri

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
        What is it to be plaster-cast in the dense cream of June?     Robed in a chain mail of summer afternoon, your dainties     hang like bricks from a clothesline, the mouth pares its     possibilities: gape or zip,
     
        and the weed-whackers make no noise at all.
     
    
     
    Robert Brand has given up on real women. Relationships just haven’t ever worked out well for him. He has, however, found a (somewhat problematic) solution, a new feminine ideal: the 110-pound sex doll he ordered over the internet.
     
    Showing an uncanny access to the voice of the rejected, unimpressive, emotionally challenged modern male, Helen Guri’s debut collection explores Robert’s transition from lost and lonely to loved, if only by the increasingly acrobatic voices in his mind.
     
    
     
    Match’s touching, whip-smart poems chart the limits of the mind/body relationship in decidedly virtual times. Does our hero’s lovesick, wry, self-searching and often self-annihilating gaze signal some catastrophic aversion to depth or a feverish (if unsettling) reassertion of the romantic impulse? Can anything good really happen when the object of one’s affection is, literally, an object? And if she looks like a human being, can you ever know for sure she isn’t one?
     
    Equal parts love story, social parody and radiant display of lyrical gymnastics, Match announces the arrival of a daring, forthright and stubbornly original new talent.
    Show book
  • Great Poets The: Matthew Arnold - cover

    Great Poets The: Matthew Arnold

    Matthew Arnold

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Considered the bridge between romanticism and modernism, Matthew Arnold wrote verse that is simple, unadorned and straightforward. From the hypnotic and beautiful lines of Dover Beach, to the pastoral narrative of The Scholar Gipsy, Arnold cast a gaze at the main intellectual issues of the nineteenth century while giving a timeless insight into man and nature. This collection covers his major poetic works, including the narrative poems, sonnets and elegiac poems, illuminating the lyricism and serenity of Arnold’s best poetry. • Delivered with verve and passion, Jonathan Keeble’s reading is suffused with an energy found in Arnold’s most moving poetry. • Other poems include Desire, Longing, A Summer Night, Consolation, Philomela, A Dream, East London, West London, Thyrsis, Immortality, Growing Old, A Wish, Bacchanalia; Or, The New Age, A Modern Sappho, The Hayswater Boat, The River, Human Life, The Buried Life, Austerity of Poetry, A Farewell, Requiescat.
    Show book
  • King Richard III - cover

    King Richard III

    William Shakespeare

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Kenneth Branagh heads an outstanding cast in playing one of Shakespeare’s strongest characters. The eighth production in the widely admired series of Shakespeare plays presented by Naxos AudioBooks in association with Cambridge University Press.
    Show book