Download Free American Pragmatism And Poetic Practice Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online American Pragmatism And Poetic Practice and write the review.

Wittgenstein wrote that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry." American poetry has long engaged questions about subject and object, self and environment, reality and imagination, real and ideal that have dominated the Western philosophical tradition since the Enlightenment. Kristen Case's book argues that American poets from Emerson to Susan Howe have responded to the central problems of Western philosophy by performing, in language, the continually shifting relation between mind and world. Pragmatism, recognizing the futility of philosophy's attempt to fix the mind/world relation, announces the insights that these poets enact. Pursuing the flights of pragmatist thinking into poetry and poetics, Case traces an epistemology that emerges from American writing, including that of Emerson, Marianne Moore, William James, and Charles Olson. Here mind and world are understood as inseparable, and the human being is regarded as, in Thoreau's terms, "part and parcel of Nature." Case presents a new picture of twentieth-century American poetry that disrupts our sense of the schools and lineages of modern and postmodern poetics, arguing that literary history is most accurately figured as a living field rather than a line. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of pragmatism, transcendentalism, and twentieth-century American poetry. Kristen Case is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maine at Farmington.
Richard Poirier, one of America's most eminent critics, reveals in this book the creative but mostly hidden alliance between American pragmatism and American poetry. He brilliantly traces pragmatism as a philosophical and literary practice grounded in a linguistic skepticism that runs from Emerson and William James to the work of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, and on to the cultural debates of today. More powerfully than ever before, Poirier shows that pragmatism had its start in Emerson, the great example to all his successors of how it is possible to redeem even as you set out to change the literature of the past. Poirier demonstrates that Emerson--and later William James--were essentially philosophers of language, and that it is language that embodies our cultural past, an inheritance to be struggled with, and transformed, before being handed on to future generations. He maintains that in Emersonian pragmatist writing, any loss--personal or cultural--gives way to a quest for what he calls "superfluousness," a kind of rhetorical excess by which powerfully creative individuals try to elude deprivation and stasis. In a wide-ranging meditation on what James called "the vague," Poirier extols the authentic voice of individualism, which, he argues, is tentative and casual rather than aggressive and dogmatic. The concluding chapters describe the possibilities for criticism created by this radically different understanding of reading and writing, which are nothing less than a reinvention of literary tradition itself. Poirier's discovery of this tradition illuminates the work of many of the most important figures in American philosophy and poetry. His reanimation of pragmatism also calls for a redirection of contemporary criticism, so that readers inside as well as outside the academy can begin to respond to poetic language as the source of meaning, not to meaning as the source of language.
Pragmatism is a humanist philosophy. In spite of the much-debated renaissance of pragmatism, however, a detailed discussion of the relationship between pragmatism and humanism is still a desideratum. It is difficult to understand the complexity of pragmatism without considering the significance of humanism. At least since the 1970s, humanism, mostly in its liberal version, has been vehemently attacked and criticized. In pragmatism, however, a particular understanding of humanism has persisted. Bringing literary studies, philosophy, and intellectual history together and establishing a transatlantic theoretical dialogue, Pragmatism and Poetic Agency endeavors to elucidate this persistence of humanism. Schulenberg continues the thought-provoking argument he developed in his previous two monographs by advancing the idea that one can only grasp the unique contemporary significance of pragmatism when one realizes how pragmatism, humanism, anti-authoritarianism, and postmetaphysics are interlinked. If one appreciates the implications and consequences of this link, then one is in a position to see pragmatism’s antifoundationalist and antirepresentationalist story of progress and emancipation as continuing the project of the Enlightenment.
In the first expansive study of American pastoral since Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden , Mikkelsen reinvigorates discussion of this literary mode as a form of cultural commentary whose subjects extend beyond the simple or rustic life to encompass the major social, economic, and political transformations of the past century.
First Published in 1996. This work presents material for understanding pragmatism's contemporary revival. The contributors consider philosophical issues ranging from the distinction between truth, knowledge and the meaning of literature to the practice of reading.
This book examines the interdisciplinary foundations of pragmatism from a literary perspective, tracing the characters and settings that populate the narratives of pragmatist thought in Henry James’s work. Cultivated during a postwar era of industrial change and economic growth, pragmatism emerged in the late nineteenth century as the new shape of American intellectual identity. Charles Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. were close friends who founded different branches of pragmatism while writing on a vast array of topics. Skeptical about philosophy, William James’s brother, Henry, stood at the margins of this group, crafting his own version of pragmatism through his novels and short stories. Gregory Phipps argues that James’s fiction weaves together the varied depictions of individuality, society, experience, and truth found in the works of Peirce, Holmes, and William James. By doing so, James brings to narrative life a defining moment in American intellectual and material history.
In Thinking Across the American Grain Giles Gunn makes a major contribution to the current revival of pragmatism in America by showing how it provides the most critically resilient and constructive response to the intellectual challenges of postmodernism. Gunn reclaims and refurbishes elements of the pragmatic tradition that either have been lost or have undergone important changes and shows how newer critical approaches have strong roots in the pragmatic tradition. For Gunn, pragmatism is no longer concerned solely with the nature of knowledge and the meaning of truth. Because of its insistence on critical self-awareness, its opposition to closed systems of thought, and its concern with the ethical, political, and practical contexts of ideas, pragmatism offers a blueprint for performing intellectual work in a world without absolutes. The world Gunn's pragmatism recognizes is one of multiple truths, unstable interpretations, and competing interests. After critically reexamining the nature and scope of the pragmatic legacy, Gunn explores the way pragmatism successfully responds to conceptual and methodological controversies, from the rebirth of ideology, the spread of interdisciplinarity, and the development of the new historicism, to the revolt against theory, the erosion of public discourse, and the problematics of American civil religion. Drawing throughout on the work of William James, Henry James, Sr., John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Poirier, Stanley Cavell, Clifford Geertz, Frank Lentricchia, Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, and others, Gunn shows that pragmatism, because it offers a way of thinking across the categories of modern intellectual specializations, is located at the intersection of these critical, and often competitive, discourses. The postmodern challenge for the pragmatist thinker is not only how to render these different discourses conversible with one another, but how to turn the salient insights of each into elements of a new democratic and critical public culture, one able to counter the twin threats of ideology and solipsism. Giles Gunn is one of our most acclaimed contemporary critics, and this broad and ambitious book is certain to become one of the central works in the current revival of critical pragmatism and cultural studies.
Embodying Pragmatism is the first monograph in English devoted to Richard Shusterman, an internationally renowned philosopher and one of today's most innovative thinkers in pragmatism and aesthetics. The book presents a comprehensive account of Shusterman's principal philosophical ideas concerning pragmatism, aesthetics, and literary theory (including such themes as interpretation, aesthetic experience, popular art, and human embodiment - culminating in his proposal of a new discipline called «somaesthetics»). As Shusterman's philosophical writings involve a dialogue with both analytic and continental traditions, this monograph not only offers a critical vision of contemporary pragmatist thought but also situates Shusterman and pragmatism within the current state of theory.
Emerging during the late nineteenth century in the diverse scholarship of US commentators such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey, American pragmatism shaped many intellectual currents within a range of disciplines including politics, education, administrative science and religion. Despite attracting attention and interest due to its conceptualization of theory, in terms of its practical consequences for improving the human condition, American pragmatism struggled to maintain its influence and suffered a hiatus until it experienced a renaissance within scholarly circles during the 1970s. While renewed interest in American pragmatism continues to grow, with some scholars distinguishing between classical, neo and new forms of pragmatism, it is only relatively recently that organization studies scholars have drawn upon American pragmatist philosophies for shedding new light on aspects of contemporary organizational life. This edited collection builds on this emergent literature in an engaging and scholarly manner. American Pragmatism and Organization is a ground-breaking collection and distinctive in its book-length treatment of American pragmatism as a relevant resource for analysing organisations. It draws together an international body of research focused on the interconnections and interplay between American pragmatism and organizational phenomena, explores the theoretical possibilities afforded by pragmatist thinking for understanding organization, and illuminates the practical advantages of doing so.