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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Skepticism and Impersonality in Modern Poetry: Literary Experiments with Philosophical Problems

Skepticism and Impersonality in Modern Poetry: Literary Experiments with Philosophical Problems

Adams, V. Joshua

Hardcover

Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry

Philosophy

ISBN10: 1350259640
ISBN13: 9781350259645
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Jul 10 2025
Pages: 248
Weight: 1.14
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Winner of the 2026 Hugh J. Silverman Book Prize

Modern literature is often described in terms of its impersonality. What is the significance of this fact?

In Skepticism and Impersonality, V. Joshua Adams follows the history of impersonality in modern poetry from Mallarmé and Eliot through to the present, engaging with work by major poets and critics, but also contemporary philosophers. Rather than seeing impersonality exclusively as a literary historical phenomenon, Adams argues that we should understand it as an attempt to address skeptical problems arising from the limitations of first-person experience.

Defending impersonality as a response to skeptical problems, including doubts about the publicity of our experiences, our knowledge of other minds, the capacity of our language to describe the world, the relationship between mind and body, and the fictionality and continuity of our sense of self, Adams analyzes what he calls experiments in impersonality as means of working through skeptical doubt. The writers discussed transform this doubt into art, whilst also ironizing it as corrosive and self-defeating. Ultimately this leads Adams to reinterpret literary impersonality as a therapeutic philosophical project.

Skepticism and Impersonality promises a new theoretical justification for our practical interest in literary texts, to renovate our conception of how those texts might do philosophical work, and to expand our sense of what a philosophical poem can be.

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