Abstract
Beginning with a discussion of George Oppen’s poem “Of Being Numerous”, Gould summarises the difficulties and necessities of silence in relation to modern philosophy, poetry and literature. Focusing on the strategic and ethical impulses of Barthes and Blanchot, as well as the famous final proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Gould traces the problematic place of silence between absence and presence, human and animal, the ineffably transcendent and the ineffably immanent. Gould places an emphasis on the Barthesian binary of silere and tacere, which distinguishes between a silence absolutely prior to language and a silence of and in language. With a focus on the example of avant-garde composer John Cage, Gould introduces the term “exposure” as a way of referring to the place of silence in and through language.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Barthes, R., “Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France”, in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, New York: Hill and Wang (1982).
———, The Neutral, trans. R.E. Krauss and D. Hollier, New York: Columbia University Press (2005).
———, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith, London: Vintage (2010).
Bataille, G., Inner Experience, trans. L.A. Boldt, Albany: State University of New York Press (1988).
Blanchot, M., Le Livre à Venir, Paris: Gallimard (1959).
———, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. A. Smock, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press (1995).
———, “The Death of the Last Writer”, in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press (2003).
Cage, J., Silence, London: Marion Boyars (1968).
Derrida, J., and Attridge, D., “This Strange Institution Called Literature”, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby, in Derrida, J., Acts of Literature, ed. D. Attridge, London: Routledge (1992).
Eeckhout, B., Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing, Columbia: University of Missouri Press (2002).
Gray, J., The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, London: Penguin (2014).
Mandelstam, O., The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, trans. C. Brown and W.S. Merwin, New York: The New York Review of Books (1973).
Nancy, J.-L., Corpus, trans. R. Rand, New York: Fordham University Press (2008).
Oppen, G., New Collected Poems, ed. M. Davidson, Manchester: Carcanet (2003).
Pascal, B., Pensées, ed. Ch.-M. des Granges, Paris: Garnier (1964), no. 206.
Roethke, T., The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, London: Faber and Faber (1966).
Winnicott, D.W., “Communicating and Not Communicating, Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites”, in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, London: Hogarth Press (1965).
Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (1974).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gould, T. (2018). Introduction. In: Silence in Modern Literature and Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93479-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93479-2_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93478-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93479-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)