{"title":"\"Prufrock\" between Acquaintance and Description: Bertrand Russell and T. S. Eliot","authors":"Maya Kronfeld","doi":"10.1353/phl.2023.a899684","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article recovers a submerged philosophical debate between Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and T. S. Eliot's \"Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.\" Russell's concern with immediate experience (\"acquaintance\") underscores a dilemma troubling literary modernism generally and modernist abstraction in particular. In \"Prufrock,\" acquaintance with reality marks an epistemic failure whose social form is the \"etherization\" gripping the city and everything in it. The conversation between Russell's philosophy and Eliot's poetry is grounded in but exceeds the men's real-life acquaintance. Rather than influence, at stake is a circulation of ideas between philosophy and modernist poetry and the questions of knowledge raised by both.","PeriodicalId":51912,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2023.a899684","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"N/A","JCRName":"LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract:This article recovers a submerged philosophical debate between Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Russell's concern with immediate experience ("acquaintance") underscores a dilemma troubling literary modernism generally and modernist abstraction in particular. In "Prufrock," acquaintance with reality marks an epistemic failure whose social form is the "etherization" gripping the city and everything in it. The conversation between Russell's philosophy and Eliot's poetry is grounded in but exceeds the men's real-life acquaintance. Rather than influence, at stake is a circulation of ideas between philosophy and modernist poetry and the questions of knowledge raised by both.
期刊介绍：
For more than a quarter century, Philosophy and Literature has explored the dialogue between literary and philosophical studies. The journal offers a constant source of fresh, stimulating ideas in the aesthetics of literature, theory of criticism, philosophical interpretation of literature, and literary treatment of philosophy. Philosophy and Literature challenges the cant and pretensions of academic priesthoods by publishing an assortment of lively, wide-ranging essays, notes, and reviews that are written in clear, jargon-free prose. In his regular column, editor Denis Dutton targets the fashions and inanities of contemporary intellectual life.
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