Graduate Work-in-Progress - Djuna Barnes, Logic, and Metaphor: How to Take Fiction as Structure

Logic is a structural device that builds truth from axioms. Even analogies, the form of logic most obviously close to metaphor, rely on agreed-upon affinities as the basis of further comparison. Metaphors, on the other hand, rely on outright fictionality to gesture toward affinity between two things. In this gesture, metaphor does not refer to an existent affinity- it creates that affinity through false equivalence. In his talk Charlie Ericson, a PhD student in the Department of English, examines the stakes of metaphor\’s forced affinities through the highly figurative examples of Djuna Barnes\’ Nightwood and The Antiphon. By setting the false equivalence of metaphor beside the contemporaneous model of symbolic logic developed in Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell\’s Principia Mathematica, this talk looks at the structure of aesthetic epistemology on its most granular level.