Poetry as epistemological inquiry : reading Bernstein reading Cavell reading Wittgenstein

摘要

As the title of this thesis suggests, Charles Bernstein's essay: "The Objects of Meaning: Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein" plays an important role in the analysis, it serves as a portal to his work. The essay on Cavell and Wittgenstein focuses on four issues which figure prominently in Bernstein's poetics: the relation between philosophy and literature, the political dimension of literature, the epistemological problem of skepticism and a theory of reading. All of these are major concerns in the works of Cavell and Wittgenstein. The first three chapters of the thesis discuss and elaborate on the first three areas of poetic and philosophical overlap. Each one gives an account of Bernstein's poetics by first supplying the philosophical context and then focusing on an aspect of Bernstein's poetics which develops from this breeding ground. It is one of my central claims, however, that Bernstein's poetry and poetry as epistemological inquiry in general is able to extend the works of philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Cavell in ways not predictable by the two philosophers' oeuvres. This is in particular apparent in my reading of Bernstein's Dark City which illustrates the ways in which poetry surmounts the possibilities of philosophy and turns out to be the adequate medium for an epistemological inquiry. Dark City (1994) is representative for Bernstein's poetry, because it brings together philosophy, politics and poetry. The dark city of words or city of dark words functions as a model and way to the just society. It stands in the tradition of Plato's Republic while reclaiming the place of poetry in society or the role of poetic thinking for the human being as such. The concluding chapter "Redemptive Reading" takes reading itself as its subject. Bernstein's theory of reading, developed in this chapter, is not only based on poetic reflection but also on the actual experience of reading/writing. The kind of reading suggested and provoked by Dark City is related to Cavell's idea of revitalizing language through a "recounting of criteria," a way of epistemological inquiry he also refers to as "redemptive reading." This kind of reading always presupposes a reading of oneself, a conversation with oneself that not only initiates the discovery of a new world but also a discovery of a new self. Bernstein's work can be looked at as an epistemological inquiry that draws attention to one's implicit knowledge of oneself and the world by making it visible in the medium of poetry. In this way he is able to teach a way of regarding/reading the world and the self that restores it with life and meaning.