14-15 Apr 2017
Berkeley CA, U.S.A.
Logic and Literary Form
April 14-15, 2017
University of California, Berkeley
https://logicandliteraryform.wordpress.com/
Keynotes:
Andrea Henderson is a Professor of English at UC Irvine. She recently
published "Symbolic Logic and the Logic of Symbolism" (Critical Inquiry
41:1) and is the author of Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern
Life (2007).
Bernard Linsky is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta.
He is currently editing T.S. Eliot's notes on Bertrand Russells lectures
on logic and is most recently the author of Acquaintance, Knowledge and
Logic (2015).
Literary formalism, formal logic: were ever two areas of study so alike
and yet so different? Both advocate structural over empirical or
historical methods in the analysis of language. Both appeal to such
methods to study how the combinatory play of words affects the meaning of
sentences and larger blocks of language. Both assess linguistic structures
and their effects in light of shared concepts like form, symbol,
predication, abstraction, and reference. Yet to borrow a distinction from
Pascal, logic works according to l'esprit de gomtrie, resolving language
into the protocols of reason and mathematics, while formalism acts on
l'esprit de finesse, exploring literature's imaginative and aesthetic
resistance to paraphrase, measurement, or calculation. Despite their many
methodological symmetries and points of historical contact, a disciplinary
gap has long separated literary formalism and formal logic.
This conference promises to bridge that gap by investigating conceptual
and historical links between literary and logical form in a range of
subfields and periods. We will identify discrete affinities and analogical
resonances among different areas of logic and literature. We will also
consider what the cross-fertilization of ideas and practices has meant for
logical and literary fields in the past, and might mean for these
disciplines in the present. What, we ask, could philosophical logic gain
from literary accounts of form, and vice versa? Can we compare literary
modes of close reading and interpretation to logical systems of inference?
Does logical paradox redound upon literary ambiguity? How do reciprocal
terms like 'figure,' 'mood,' and 'tense' help us think across literary and
logical concerns? Is there any way to reconcile logic's apotheosis of
reason and rationality with literatures stress on imagination and affect?
What can we learn about these questions by tracing historical interactions
and reciprocal influences between literary and logical thinkers and
writers?
We will convene amid an unprecedented wave of scholarship addressing
historical and theoretical commonalities in literature and logic. Literary
scholars have begun charting rich histories of influence between writers
and logicians of all periods, even as theorists have started correlating
logical and literary notions like truth, precision, probability, and
signification. Meanwhile, historians of science are mapping forgotten
networks of exchange among discourses like mathematics and aesthetics,
while logicians are tracing the intellectual kinship and methodological
reciprocity of artistic, mathematical, and logical definitions of form.
Spanning these nascent conversations, our conference undertakes an
interdisciplinary effort to extend and enrich this current surge in
research connecting formal logic and literary formalism.
In addition to papers on the historical and theoretical dimensions of form
and formalism in relation to literature and logic, we welcome papers on:
Historical connections among branches of philosophical logic,
rhetoric, literature, and/or literary criticism
Method and analysis in logic and literary criticism (e.g., standards
and protocols of evidence, proof, demonstration, inference)
Logic against literature, Literature against logic (reason and
imagination, demonstration and intuition, probability, bounded
rationality)
Aesthetics and/of logic, the logic of art
Abstraction in logic, literature, and art
Narrative / narrative theory and logic (fictional and possible worlds,
questions of reference, counterfactuals and conditionals)
Rhetoric and style in logic and literature
Mood and/or modality in logic and literature
Ethics and politics of form, literary formalism, and/or logic
Computation in logic and/or literature (digital methods, networks,
artificial intelligence, machine learning)
Mathematics, literature, and logic
Precision, exactness, accuracy vs. vagueness, uncertainty, obscurity
Keywords: logic, literature, form, formalism,
induction/deduction/abduction, symbolism, imagination, reason, aesthetics,
mathematics, ambiguity, paradox, precision, abstraction, reduction,
meaning, signification, probability, inference, implication, predication,
relation, mood, figure
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