Beschreibung:
Much current theorizing about literature involves efforts to renew our sense of aesthetic values in reading. Such is the case with new formalism as well as recent appeals to the notion of "surface reading." While sympathetic to these efforts, Charles Altieri believes they ultimately fall short because too often they fail to account for the values that engage literary texts in the social world. In Reckoning with the Imagination, Altieri argues for a reconsideration of the Kantian tradition of Idealist ethics, which he believes can restore much of the power of the arguments for the role of aesthetics in art. Altieri finds a perspective for that restoration in a reading of Wittgenstein's later work that stresses Wittgenstein's parallel criticisms of the spirit of empiricism.
1. Why Wittgenstein Matters for Literary Theory2. The Work Texts Do: Toward a Phenomenology of Imagining Imaginatively3. Where Doubt Has No Purchase: The Roles of Display4. The Concept of Expression in the Arts5. Expression and Exemplification6. What Literary Theory Can Learn from Wittgenstein's Silence about Ethics7. Appreciating AppreciationNotesBibliographyIndex