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<p>This dissertation uses Nietzsche's writings on truth and metaphor as a lens through
which to reconsider the contribution that modernist art sought to make to both the
understanding and, ultimately, the reconstruction of everyday life. It begins with
a consideration of the sentiment, first articulated on a wide scale by the artists
and philosophers of the romantic era, that something essential to the cohesion of
individual and social experience has been lost during the turbulent transition to
modernity. By situating Nietzsche's thought vis-à-vis the decline of nineteenth-century
idealism in both its Continental and Victorian forms, I demonstrate how his principal
texts brought to an advanced stage of philosophical expression a set of distinctly
post-romantic concerns about the role of mind and language in the construction of
reality that would soon come to define the practice of modernism in philosophy and
the arts. Nietzsche's contribution to moral philosophy is typically regarded as a
skeptical, and even wholly negative, one. Yet a central element of his thought is
obscured, I argue, when we fail to account for its positive conviction that "higher
moralities are, or ought to be, possible." Because his philosophy attempts to diagnose
"genealogically" the concrete social, historical, and psychological conditions under
which truth-relations are generated and maintained within a given cultural framework,
it is in fact every bit as constructive as it is deconstructive, involving a sustained
and ethically significant reflection on the character of normativity itself.</p><p>This
initial confrontation with Nietzsche's philosophy sets the stage for the studies of
individual artists--the American poets Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, as well as
the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman--for whom these traditionally epistemological
concerns about the nature of representation also shade naturally into the domain of
ethics. In these chapters, I demonstrate how aesthetic modernism produces a range
of sophisticated responses to the predicament of relativism that Nietzsche articulated
while reaching sometimes radically different conclusions than Nietzsche about the
nature and extent of human agency in the modern world. This enables us to see how
modernism makes an essential contribution to what the philosopher Charles Taylor has
characterized as the broader cultural effort to "overcome epistemology" by exploring
the structures of intentionality and fostering in us a basic "awareness about the
limits and conditions of our knowing"--a project to which modernist art and philosophy
both make essential contributions.</p>
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