Thinking the poem

Elizabeth Bishop's transcendental "Crusoe in England" (for example)

Walter Jost

pp. 153-214

in: Garry L. Hagberg (ed), Wittgenstein on aesthetic understanding, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

What might a mode of grammatical and rhetorical criticism, one largely motivated "after Cavell after Wittgenstein," look like, and do? Since those two predicates in the first place here—"rhetorical" and the "grammatical" (philosophical) investigations of Cavell and Wittgenstein—are oriented to the practical in various senses, it may be better to reformulate such ambition by circumscribing a specific, concrete case. Then we could ask a more or less compelling, anyway a more modest question: If we take poems "as' continuous somehow with everyday thinking—reasoning, arguing, imagining, comparing, and judging—then how might we think ourselves more intelligently and pleasurably into such poetry as that (for example) of Elizabeth Bishop, trying to see her as exemplifying what Harold Bloom said of A. R. Ammons

Cited authors

Wittgenstein Ludwig

Bloom Harold

Bishop Elizabeth