Description
"Lyric Logic tells an original story about the relationship between poetry and philosophy. Many poems, Johanna Winant argues, represent thinking, but only some poems model philosophical reasoning. For those that do, including poetry by modern American poets Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop, poetic forms are also logical forms. This book shows that two different stories - modernism in literary studies and the problem of induction in philosophy - are sometimes the same story. Both are about destabilizing and enriching encounters with the new and unexpected. The problem of induction identifies the unreliability of this reasoning to predict future events based only on past ones and surfaces as an urgent topic in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American thought. Attention to induction in philosophy coincided with the emergence of literary modernism because both poetry and philosophy participated in a larger, fundamental question in modernity's intellectual history: How to understand and represent the new? Lyric Logic shows how modern American poetry responds to this problem by doing philosophical work through its formal experimentation. Winant recasts the poetics of central figures as examples of inductive reasoning. They argue that we see induction at its most robust in poems, and they defend induction, however unreliable, as the best way to make sense of the unpredictable modern world." - Provided by publisher
