SOURCE: A review of Wittgenstein's Ladder, in Chicago Review, Vol. 43, No. 2, Spring, 1997, pp. 117–21.

In the following positive review, Clippinger discusses Perloff's thesis and theoretical position concerning aesthetics and ethics in Wittgenstein's Ladder.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's place in philosophy is certain, but (for good or bad) he has yet to be embraced by literary theory, which remains firmly under the sway of Continental philosophy. Despite this neglect, Marjorie Perloff demonstrates in Wittgenstein's Ladder that Wittgenstein's proposition, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”; his method of inquiry that layers question upon questions; his gravitation towards metaphysics and spirituality; and his concern for ethics, all bear directly upon twentieth-century literature and literary study.

Perloff gleans from Wittgenstein four concepts—the strangeness in the ordinary; the implicit limitations of language and knowledge; the self-as-cultural construct; and the nonexistence of propositions of absolute value—and uses them to argue...