Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1945-1975

Fictions of Fact and Value argues that the philosophy of logical positivism, considered the antithesis of literary postmodernism, exerts a determining influence on the development of American fiction in the three decades following 1945 in what amounts to a constitutive encounter between literature and philosophy at mid-century: after the end of the modernism, as it was traditionally conceived, but prior to the rise of postmodernism, as it came to be known. Two particular postwar literary preoccupations derive from logical positivist philosophy: the fact/value problem and the correlative distinction between sense and nonsense. Yet even as postwar writers responded to logical positivism as a threat to the imagination, their works often manifest its influence, particularly with regard to "emotive" or "meaningless" terms. Logical positivist philosophy appears tactically in works of fiction in order to advance aesthetic strategies. Far from a straightforward history of ideas, Fictions of Fact and Value charts a genealogy that is often erased in the very texts where it registers and disowned by the very authors that it includes. LeMahieu complicates a predominant narrative of intellectual history in which a liberating postmodernism triumphs over a reactionary positivism by historicizing the literary response to positivism in works by John Barth, Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo, Iris Murdoch, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The centrality of the fact/value problem to both positivism and postmodernism demands a rethinking of postwar literary history.

Table of Contents:
Introduction "Postwar Fiction, the Fact/Value Problem, and the Literary Response to Logical Positivism" Chapter One "Indigestible Residues" Ludwig Wittgenstein, Aesthetic Negativism, and the Incompleteness of Logical Positivism Chapter Two "Negative Appearance" Flannery O'Connor, the Fact/Value Problem, and the Threat of Logical Positivism Chapter Three "Contradictory Feelings" John Barth, Non-Mystical Value-Thinking, and the Exhaustion of Logical Positivism Chapter Four "Eternal Things" Saul Bellow, the Infinite Longings of the Soul, and the Shortcomings of Logical Positivism Chapter Five "Illogical Negativism" Thomas Pynchon, the Critique of Modernism, and the Erasure of Logical Positivism

About the Author :
Michael LeMahieu is Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University.

Review :
"[A] revealing monograph on the unsuspected shadow cast by logical positivism on post-war American fiction...." --American Literature "Erudite, lucid, rigorous-indeed fearless-in its engagement with Wittgenstein, Adorno, Carnap and others, commanding in its analytic precision and range of reference, Fictions of Fact and Value offers an account of the philosophic texture of postwar American literature that is eye-opening, absorbing, and utterly persuasive, worthy of being compared to the deservedly admired The Program Era by Mark McGurl. Michael LeMahieu's book is an altogether remarkable debut." --Ross Posnock, Columbia University "Who would have thought that logical positivism would prove more important for understanding post-1945 fiction than postmodernism! The brilliance of LeMahieu's account hinges on his elegant portrayal of the role Wittgenstein's Tractatus played not just in the development of logical positivism but also in prefiguring the various 'tactics of aesthetic negativism developed by postwar writers.' A must-read for anyone interested in Literature and Philosophy." --Steven Meyer, Washington University