• Introduction: Wittgenstein, modernism, and the contradictions of writing philosophy as poetry
    with Michael LeMahieu
    In Michael LeMahieu & Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé (eds.), Wittgenstein and Modernism, University of Chicago Press. 2017.
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    This innovative critical study reinterprets Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy for the study of modernist and contemporary literature and brings Wittgenstein into literary conversations around problems of difficulty, ethical instruction, and the yearning for transformation. Central to Karen Zumhagen-Yekple͹'s book are her critical readings of key modernist texts by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Throughout, Zumhagen-Yekplé brings to bear an interpretive framework that she derives…Read more
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    Wittgenstein and Modernism (edited book)
    with LeMahieu Michael
    University of Chicago Press. 2017.
    Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declared that philosophy “ought really to be written only as a form of poetry,” and he even described the Tractatus as “philosophical and, at the same time, literary.” But few books have really followed up on these claims, especially as they relate to the special literary and artistic period in which Wittgenstein worked. This book offers the first collection to address the rich, vexed, and often contradictory relationship between modernism—the twentieth century’s pre…Read more
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    In this essay, I read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse together with philosopher Cora Diamond’s writing on literature and moral life, writing marked by her inheritance from Wittgenstein. I first attend to Woolf’s commitment (one she shares with Wittgenstein) to grappling with what I take to be signature issues of modernism: question, quest, and a longing for vision or revised understanding as a way of confronting the difficulty of reality. I then probe Woolf’s engagement with these issues by reading he…Read more
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    This essay takes up the significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for our understanding of literature (and vice versa) through a comparative reading of the stakes and aims of Kafka's and Wittgenstein's respective circa 1922 puzzle texts “Von den Gleichnissen” (“On Parables”) and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The essay builds upon the so-called resolute program of Wittgenstein interpretation developed by Cora Diamond, James Conant, and others, bringing its insights to bear on Kafka's perple…Read more
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    Zumhagen-Yekplé reads Wittgenstein’s Tractatus resolutely, alongside the “Ithaca” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, arguing that looking at Wittgenstein in this way offers new dimensions for understanding Wittgenstein’s relationship to modernism that are otherwise unavailable through more traditional readings of the Tractatus. Zumhagen-Yekplé traces the shared aspects of Wittgenstein’s and Joyce’s counter-epiphanic aesthetic practices, concentrating on the explorations they conduct in their resp…Read more