"Indigestible residues": Ludwig Wittgenstein, aesthetic negativism, and the incompleteness of logical positivism -- "Negative appearance": Flannery O'Connor, the fact/value problem, and the threat of logical positivism -- "Contradictory feelings": John Barth, non-mystical value-thinking, and the exhaustion of logical positivism -- "Eternal things": Saul Bellow, the infinite longings of the soul, and the shortcomings of logical positivism -- "Illogical negativism": Thomas Pynchon, the critique of modernism, and the erasure of logical positivism
'Fictions of Fact and Value' argues that the philosophy of logical positivism, considered the antithesis of literary postmodernism, exerts a determining influence on the development of American fiction in the three decades following 1945 in what amounts to a constitutive encounter between literature and philosophy at mid-century: after the end of the modernism, as it was traditionally conceived, but prior to the rise of postmodernism, as it came to be known