Abstract:Martin Chuzzlewit is a blurry novel. Where Dickens typically invites his audience to picture precisely what he sees (whether in life or only in his imagination), in this book he keeps us at a troubling distance, rendering textual imagery—characters, places, events—in language that tends to obscure rather than clarify. I interpret the blurriness of this text through key innovations in Victorian mathematics that give rise to the fuzzy logic of the twentieth century. A spirit of algebraic abstraction pervaded nineteenth-century mathematics. I look here to the emergence of many-valued truth systems in (algebraized) British logic, which suggested that a vague term might still be considered an articulate one. I propose that Dickens was experimenting with the bounds of language—and the parameters of the real—in ways similar to contemporary mathematicians, and that vagueness in his writing anticipates perspectival shifts towards abstract aesthetics in the decades that followed. Furthermore, I argue that Dickens feigns shortsightedness in this book to manifest an uncomfortable distance between novel and reader, as an expression of the estrangement he felt on his 1842 American tour, and as a warning to audiences in America and England alike that ego makes strangers of us all.

中文翻译：

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模糊逻辑：Martin Chuzzlewit 的现代数学和近视美学

摘要：Martin Chuzzlewit 是一部模糊的小说。狄更斯通常会邀请他的观众准确地描绘他所看到的（无论是在生活中还是仅在他的想象中），而在这本书中，他与我们保持了一个令人不安的距离，用容易模糊的语言呈现文字意象——人物、地点、事件而不是澄清。我通过维多利亚时代数学的关键创新来解释本文的模糊性，这些创新产生了 20 世纪的模糊逻辑。代数抽象的精神贯穿了 19 世纪的数学。我在这里看到了（代数化的）英国逻辑中多值真值系统的出现，这表明一个模糊的术语可能仍然被认为是一个清晰的术语。我认为狄更斯正在以类似于当代数学家的方式试验语言的界限和真实的参数，而他写作中的模糊性预示着在接下来的几十年里人们的视角会转向抽象美学。此外，我认为狄更斯在本书中假装短视，以表现小说与读者之间令人不安的距离，以此表达他在 1842 年美国之旅中感受到的疏远，并警告美国和英国的观众，自我使陌生人变得陌生。我们所有人。