Words pictured, pictures read: Imagination, literary language and visuality in Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Sartre

This work explores the pictoriality of language by analyzing the works of three 20th century philosophers: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. It also seeks to revive one of the most basic approaches to literature, which conceptualizes the act of reading as a kind of imaginary "seeing" or "picturing." What does it mean to picture a written text? Why does one make references to visuality, while referring to the act of reading? These questions concern both literature and the philosophies of language and mind. The three philosophers whose writings I analyze share a similar skepticism: they all dismiss the pictorial description in the face of other models of language that they propose or assume to be true. In my thesis, I show that the pictorial description resists the philosophers' ambiguous and often self-contradicting dismissals, and that he use of the "picture" in relation to language cannot simply be set aside as a mere analogy. I argue that the picture is a most significant analogy, and a model, by way of which one makes sense of language in general, and literature in particular.;Specifically, I look at the adoption, transformation, and ultimate repudiation of the picture in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus and in Philosophical Investigations. I discuss how Wittgenstein sets up a dualism between the "applications" of the world and the "pictures" of the imagination, privileging the former over the latter. By way of a reading of his "Work of Art" essay, I analyze the role of the picture in Martin Heidegger's conceptualization of language, critiquing his distinction between the enframing picture (as the representational use of language) and the world-disclosing picture (as its truthful use). I question the analytic distinctions that Jean-Paul Sartre makes between language and pictoriality, between sign and image consciousness in his L'Imaginaire , while underscoring the continuity between written words and visual pictures. I show that the philosophers' arguments on language often intersect with literary and cultural texts, including illustrations, paintings and performances; as such, they provide insights into the nature of the "literary."...