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Rather than dwelling on Melville's doubts and ambivalences, as many literary critics do, Evans emphasizes his certainties. She contends that in Moby-Dick he is a literary realist in the classical--that is Platonic--sense, refusing the persistent dualism of mind and world in Western philosophy since Descartes and Locke. Melville shows how concepts are formed in human activity, and he verifies the ability of language, and especially of fiction, to connect the sensible with the ideal. In this bracing, consequential book, Evans alters our understanding of the relationships among literature, philosophy (especially Wittgenstein), and aesthetics. --Samuel Otter, professor of English, University of California, Berkeley I much admire how K.L Evans brings together philosophy and literary criticism in order to provide an exciting account of what Melville sought in realism. Learned, lucid, and passionate, this book claims that realism is a less a matter of accuracy and range of accurate sensuous detail than a way of realizing the force of how those facts and the discourses accompanying them give shape to imaginative spaces. Realism for the most ambitious writers makes vivid the conceptual frameworks cultures have produced around a concrete name--like the whale. Only Ahab, and the author emulating Ahab, fully see what the whale is by imagining its full implications for those who have tried to name it accurately. A thrilling account of Wittgenstein's Tractactus provides the conceptual substance for this view of naming by stressing how Wittgenstein's states of affairs are not descriptions but images for how language has developed stages for acknowledging what naming can involve. --Charles Altieri, professor of English, University of California, Berkeley

Rather than dwelling on Melville's doubts and ambivalences, as many literary critics do, Evans emphasizes his certainties. She contends that in Moby-Dick he is a literary realist in the classical--that is Platonic--sense, refusing the persistent dualism of mind and world in Western philosophy since Descartes and Locke. Melville shows how concepts are formed in human activity, and he verifies the ability of language, and especially of fiction, to connect the sensible with the ideal. In this bracing, consequential book, Evans alters our understanding of the relationships among literature, philosophy (especially Wittgenstein), and aesthetics. --Samuel Otter, professor of English, University of California, Berkeley I much admire how K.L Evans brings together philosophy and literary criticism in order to provide an exciting account of what Melville sought in realism. Learned, lucid, and passionate, this book claims that realism is a less a matter of accuracy and range of accurate sensuous detail than a way of realizing the force of how those facts and the discourses accompanying them give shape to imaginative spaces. Realism for the most ambitious writers makes vivid the conceptual frameworks cultures have produced around a concrete name--like the whale. Only Ahab, and the author emulating Ahab, fully see what the whale is by imagining its full implications for those who have tried to name it accurately. A thrilling account of Wittgenstein's Tractactus provides the conceptual substance for this view of naming by stressing how Wittgenstein's states of affairs are not descriptions but images for how language has developed stages for acknowledging what naming can involve. --Charles Altieri, professor of English, University of California, Berkeley This is an important book, which goes far to rescue Melville from the charge of inconsistency of genre and feeling: of swinging between factual reportage and romantic fancy. It does so by making Melville's dissatisfaction with both poles of nineteenth-century thought--Lockeian empiricism and Kantian idealism--central to his later work. It argues that Melville's deeply American concern with the centrality of the practical in human life and consciousness allies him far more with such twentieth-century philosophers as Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, or Stanley Cavell, than with the thought of his own day. --Bernard Harrison, author of Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory Crash! Now, you can hear it! Boom! What's left of the old, ivy-covered walls dividing literary theory from analytical philosophy are, at long last, tumbling down. Kim Evans and her new book One Foot in the Finite are in charge of the demolition. Evans's fluent expertise in all her subjects--including Melville studies and Wittgensteinian philosophy of language--runs deep and broad. Her writing is crystal clear, always incisive. Grab a copy of the book and watch the walls crumble! Stand back! Once those dreary walls are down, whole new disciplinary vistas open up. --Charles McCarty, professor of philosophy, Indiana University

[F]or readers interested in either the connections between literature and philosophy or ordinary language philosophy, this is an important, even indispensable text. - ALH Online Review, XVIII

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K. L. EVANS is the author of Whale! and the editor, with Branka Arsic, of Melville's Philosophies.

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