Wittgenstein, modernity and the critique of modernism

This article aims to demonstrate how new light can be cast upon Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by looking at the work in the contexts of modernity and modernism. Rather than placing the book, as exegetes traditionally have done, in the lineage of analytic philosophy, I examine it instead in relation to some of the cultural and aesthetic discourses of its times. Specifically, I contend that the Tractatus' engagement with issues of modernity and culture can be grasped through a close analysis of the work's literary form. I also argue that an understanding of the author's dialectical method can bring us to think differently about the so-called 'problems of language' that we encounter in certain works of literary modernism. By examining the Tractatus in these contexts, my primary aim is to show how Wittgenstein's philosophical insights can be extended and applied to domains where his own work does not explicitly focus. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.