Wittgenstein's writings, though not themselves poetry, are redolent of poetic elements. Still, perhaps only a poet?or a humanities professor such as Perloff (Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, LJ 12/92) with a poetic sensibility?would find the ordinary "strange." Surely Wittgenstein argues philosophically that it is just the non-strangeness of the ordinary that is the key to solving (or dissolving) philosophical problems. Be that as it may, this fine study, in which Perloff disclaims any attempt to explain Wittgenstein and merely wants to "examine the relationship of [his] mode of investigation...to the 'ordinary language' poetics so central to our own time," manages to show a more than elementary understanding of his thinking. Proficient in German, she often gives more accurate translations of certain central passages in Wittgenstein's original than the standard English texts. A welcome addition to Wittgensteiniana from a unique perspective; for academic collections in philosophy, literature, and poetry.?Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Mgt. Lib., Washington, D.C.
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Marjorie Perloff is professor of English emerita at Stanford University and the Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is the author of many books, including, most recently, Poetics in a New Key and Unoriginal Genius, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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.