Description
Book SynopsisHow did the Victorians think about love and desire?Reader, I married him, Jane Eyre famously says of her beloved Mr. Rochester near the end of Charlotte Brontë's novel. But why does she do it, we might logically ask, after all he's put her through? The Victorian realist novel privileges the marriage plot, in which love and desire are represented as formative social experiences. Yet how novelists depict their characters reasoning about that erotic desiremaking something intelligible and ethically meaningful out of the aspect of interior life that would seem most essentially embodied, singular, and nonlinguisticremains a difficult question. In Bad Logic, Daniel Wright addresses this paradox, investigating how the Victorian novel represented reasoning about desire without diluting its intensity or making it mechanical. Connecting problems of sexuality to questions of logic and language, Wright posits that forms of reasoning that seem fuzzy, opaque, difficult, or simply bad can function
Trade ReviewIt is this attention to erotic energies and their struggle for articulacy that makes
Bad Logic such a compelling intervention into a number of current debates in Victorian studies, and a striking declaration of fiction's wider philosophical exigency.
—
Times Higher EducationDeploying a confident command of philosophical logic alongside an ear well attuned to moments of textual vulnerability, Wright offers a compelling account of the ways we twist the language of reason when "we're called up to make our erotic impulses intelligible to others or to ourselves" . . .
Bad Logic is, at its core, a book of deep
generosity. Where I had often seen stammer and bluster, or overly pat aphorism, Wright hears searching, and sacred, attempts to communicate. Beyond just offering readings,
Bad Logic teaches how to listen . . .
Bad Logic has given me a vocabulary for describing the ways in which the language of novels work when they are at their most tenuous and vulnerable.
—Jesse Rosenthal, Johns Hopkins University,
Victorian StudiesTable of ContentsAcknolwedgements
To Give a Form to Formless Things
1. Charlotte Brontë’s Contradictions
2. Anthony Trollope’s Tautologies
3. George Eliot’s Vagueness
4. Henry James’s Generality
Queer Fiction and The Law
Notes
Bibliography
Index
