Nancy Yousef. The Aesthetic Commonplace: Wordsworth, Eliot, Wittgenstein and the Language of Every Day

Abstract

Nancy Yousef’s thoroughly researched and artful new book delineates a ‘conceptual congruence’ (1) across the works of William Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Ludwig Wittgenstein: the poet, the novelist, and the philosopher, as Yousef designates them, each in their own way insists upon the significance of commonplace people, situations, and varieties of language that are unassimilable to dominant ‘forms of knowledge’ (70). Anyone who has spent time with these three writers will have noticed, to some degree, a shared focus on everyday sites of meaning that can slip through the cracks of poetry, philosophy, and science. Such a reader may also have noticed a shared earnestness and may, in certain moods, have felt embarrassed by it: Yousef’s central focus is the ‘methodological force’ of the ‘appeals’ these authors make, sometimes directly to the reader, which are characterized by ‘open, often discomfiting avowal[s] of emotional entailments’ (3). These appeals, she argues, are meant to reclaim regions of experience that may otherwise be overlooked. The book’s analysis of this commonplace aesthetic is accompanied by an appeal of Yousef’s own: she asks us not to dismiss such passages as gushy sentimentalism but to read them as part of a ‘serious’ (6) effort to match ‘form and concept’ (8), or to find language that will rescue ‘apparently trivial details’ (9) from oblivion. Yousef’s own arrestingly earnest prose serves as a methodological principle, continuous with her attention to the intellectual and emotional sincerity of the book’s central figures (the index entry on Stanley Cavell, though substantial, cannot capture the density of his presence in these pages).