Download or read book Pragmatism and Literary Studies written by Winfried Fluck and published by Gunter Narr Verlag. This book was released on 1999 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Against Theory written by W. J. Thomas Mitchell and published by Chicago : University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Against Theory," the title essay in this volume, challenges the notion that literary theory has any real work to do, or any results to show. This challenge--issued by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in Critical Inquiry (8:4)--strikes some critics as scandalous, others as provocative and productive. The argument is directed against both sides of the current debates in literary theory, criticizing theoretical "objectivists" like E. D. Hirsch, Jr., on the one hand, and proponents of indeterminacy like Paul de Man on the other. The attack is not just on a particular way of doing theory but on the entire project of literary theory. The challenge is not only to a way of thinking and writing but to a way of making a living. The resulting controversy has drawn so much attention among literary critics that it has been collected in a single volume so that the debate can be followed from start to finish. This collection includes the essay "Against Theory," seven responses to it, and a rejoinder by Knapp and Michaels (originally published in Critical Inquiry 9:4); in addition, there are two new statements plus a final reply by Knapp and Michaels. The debate chronicled in this volume raises the most fundamental issues in the theory of meaning and the practice of interpretation. Are Knapp and Michaels confronting literary theory with a new "pragmatic" form of theory? Or are they (as some of their respondents suggest) arguing for a new form of nihilism? "If it is a nihilism," writes editor W. J. T. Mitchell, "it is one that demands an answer, not easy polemical dismissal, one that calls for theory to clarify its claims, not to mystify them and the easy assurance of intellectual fashion and institutional authority." It is the intention of Against Theory to aid in that clarification.
Download or read book Poetry and Pragmatism written by Richard Poirier and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Pragmatics and Literature written by Siobhan Chapman and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-12-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatics and Literature is an important collection of new work by leading practitioners working at the interface between pragmatic theory and literary analysis. The individual studies collected here draw on a variety of theoretical approaches and are concerned with a range of literary genres. All have a shared focus on applying ideas from specific pragmatic frameworks to understanding the production, interpretation and evaluation of literary texts. A full-length introductory chapter highlights distinctions and contrasts between pragmatic theories, but also brings out complementarities, shared aims and assumptions, and ways in which different pragmatic theories can make different contributions to our understanding of literary texts. The book as a whole encourages a sense of coherence for the field and presents insights from various approaches for systematic comparison. Building on previous work by the editors, the contributors and others, it makes a significant contribution to the growing field of pragmatic literary stylistics.
Download or read book Embodying Pragmatism written by Wojciech Małecki and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Politics Persuasion and Pragmatism written by Ellen Susan Peel and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An addition to the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative series, Peel's book addresses how feminist utopian narratives attempt to persuade readers to adopt certain beliefs. Using three feminist utopian novels as her main examples, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five by Doris Lessing; The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin; and Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig, Peel examines how belief-bridging and protean metaphor in these works persuade readers. Literary persuasion, often dismissed as propaganda, in fact works in subtle and profound ways. The book presents major techniques by which narrative literature exercises this sophisticated influence on beliefs. Ultimately concluding that the pragmatic works better than the static in utopian feminism, Peel shows how, in novels such as those under discussion, the narrative techniques support pragmatism. Inquiring how narrative form can shape political belief by affecting readers' responses, the author integrates topics that are rarely combined. The book investigates three theoretical issues: utopian belief, distinguishing the perfectionism of the static from the vitality of the pragmatic and showing how the latter creates narrative energy; the persuasive process, tracing narrative form and asking how implied readers match real ones and how readers are swayed by belief-bridging and protean metaphor; and feminist belief, a nuanced definition that accounts both for what links feminists and what makes them diverse. Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism explores the rhetorical and ethical power of narrative literature.
Download or read book Literary Discourse written by Jørgen Dines Johansen and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the semiotic theory of American philosopher Charles S. Peirce, Johansen applies psychoanalysis, psychology, literary hermeneutics, literary history, Habermasian communication, and discourse theory to literature, and, in the process, redefines it.
Download or read book The New Pragmatism written by Alan Malachowski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some hundred years after its inception, Pragmatism has reclaimed centre stage, not just within philosophy, but also within intellectual culture as a whole. This book sets out to explain what it is about Pragmatism that makes it such a distinctively attractive prospect to so many thinkers, even in previously hostile traditions. Alan Malachowski sets out in a clear and accessible manner the original guiding thoughts behind the Pragmatist approach to philosophy and examines how these thoughts have faired in the hands of those largely responsible for the present revival (Putnam and Rorty). The Pragmatism that emerges from this exploration of its "classic" and "new wave" forms is then assessed in terms of both its philosophical potential and its wider cultural contribution. Readers will emerge from the book with a more secure grip on what Pragmatism involves and a correspondingly clearer grasp of what it has to offer and what its current resurgence is all about.
Download or read book The Poetics of Transition written by Jonathan Levin and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the work of American pragmatists and of three major literary modernists, and reveals how their work foregrounds William James's concept of transitional consciousness.
Download or read book Experience and Experimental Writing written by Paul Grimstad and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American pragmatism is premised on the notion that to find out what something means, look to fruits rather than roots. But, as Paul Grimstad shows, the thought of the classical pragmatists is itself the fruit of earlier experiments in American literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and (contemporaneously with the flowering of pragmatism) Henry James, each in their different ways prefigure at the level of literary form what emerge as the guiding ideas of classical pragmatism. Specifically, this occurs in the way an experimental approach to composition informs the classical pragmatists' central idea that experience is not a matter of correspondence but of an ongoing attunement to process. The link between experience and experiment is thus for Grimstad a way of gauging the deeper intellectual history by which literary experiments--Emerson's Essays; Poe's invention of the detective story in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue;" Melville's Pierre; and Henry James's late style--find their philosophical expression in classical pragmatism. Charles Peirce's notion of the "abductive" inference; William James's "radical empiricism;" and John Dewey's naturalist account of experience inform the book's readings. Experience and Experimental Writing also frames its set of claims in relation to more contemporary debates within literary criticism and philosophy that have so far not been taken up in this context: putting Richard Poirier's account of the relation of pragmatism to literature into dialogue with Stanley Cavell's inheritance of Emerson as someone decidedly not a "pragmatist;" to differences between classical pragmatists like William James and John Dewey and more recent, post-linguistic turn thinkers like Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom.
Download or read book William Faulkner William James and the American Pragmatic Tradition written by David H. Evans and published by Southern Literary Studies. This book was released on 2008-05 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WILLIAM FAULKNER, WILLIAM JAMES, AND THE AMERICAN PRAGMATIC TRADITION pairs the writings of America's most intellectually challenging modern novelist, William Faulkner, and the ideas of America's most revolutionary modern philosopher, William James to demonstrate that Faulkner's writing is deeply connected to the emergence of pragmatism as an intellectual doctrine and as a cultural force in the early twentieth century. With its creative coupling of James's philosophy and Faulkner's art, Evans's lively, engaging book makes a bold contribution to Faulkner studies and studies of southern literature.
Download or read book Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution 1850 1940 written by James Livingston and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of corporate capitalism was a cultural revolution as well as an economic event, according to James Livingston. That revolution resides, he argues, in the fundamental reconstruction of selfhood, or subjectivity, that attends the advent of an 'age of surplus' under corporate auspices. From this standpoint, consumer culture represents a transition to a society in which identities as well as incomes are not necessarily derived from the possession of productive labor or property. From the same standpoint, pragmatism and literary naturalism become ways of accommodating the new forms of solidarity and subjectivity enabled by the emergence of corporate capitalism. So conceived, they become ways of articulating alternatives to modern, possessive individualism. Livingston argues accordingly that the flight from pragmatism led by Lewis Mumford was an attempt to refurbish a romantic version of modern, possessive individualism. This attempt still shapes our reading of pragmatism, Livingston claims, and will continue to do so until we understand that William James was not merely a well-meaning middleman between Charles Peirce and John Dewey and that James's pragmatism was both a working model of postmodern subjectivity and a novel critique of capitalism.
Download or read book Rhetoric Sophistry Pragmatism written by Steven Mailloux and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-05-18 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The anti-sceptical relativism and self-conscious rhetoric of the pragmatist tradition, which began with the Older Sophists of Ancient Greece and developed through an American tradition including William James and John Dewey has attracted new attention in the context of late twentieth-century postmodernist thought. At the same time there has been a more general renewal of interest across a wide range of humanistic and social science disciplines in rhetoric itself: language use, writing and speaking, persuasion, figurative language, and the effect of texts. This book, written by leading scholars, explores the various ways in which rhetoric, sophistry and pragmatism overlap in their current theoretical and political implications, and demonstrates how they contribute both to a rethinking of the human sciences within the academy and to larger debates over cultural politics.
Download or read book Disciplining the New Pragmatism written by Leszek Drong and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disciplining the New Pragmatism is both a tribute and a corrective to the neopragmatist perspective in American literary studies. It sets out to give a detailed account of the contemporary pragmatists' views, but it also goes beyond those views to tender a new vision of the discipline of literary studies and to forge a new rhetoric, largely crafted out of tropes borrowed from their writings, which could be of service to literary scholars. Its primary objective is to argue that, despite their claims to the contrary, Richard Rorty, Walter Benn Michaels, Stanley Fish and the other latter-day antifoundationalists and neopragmatists make a difference to what is going on in the literature department. Consequently, the author argues that the neopragmatist position may be made far more effective and resonant than the neopragmatists themselves recognise in their writings. To this end, he offers his own category of a neosophistic pragmatism, which serves as an example of what may result from bringing the New Pragmatist insights into a sharper disciplinary focus.
Download or read book Pragmatic Literary Stylistics written by S. Chapman and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In considering the ways in which current theories of language in use and communicative processes are applied to the analysis, interpretation and definition of literary texts, this book sets an agenda for the future of pragmatic literary stylistics and provides a foundation for future research and debate.
Download or read book The Pragmatic Mind written by Mark Bauerlein and published by New Americanists. This book was released on 1997 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English professor Mark Bauerlein studies the pragmatism of Emerson, James, and Peirce and its overlooked relevance for the neopragmatism of later thinkers. Bauerlein argues that those "original" pragmatists are often cited casually and imprecisely as mere precursors to contemporary intellectuals, but, in fact, many broad social and academic reforms hailed by new pragmatists were actually grounded in the "old" school.
Download or read book Pragmatism written by Russell B. Goodman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-25 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russell Goodman examines the curious reemergence of pragmatism in a field dominated in the past decades by phenomenology, logic, positivism, and deconstruction. With contributions from major contemporary and classical thinkers such as Cornel West, Richard Rorty, Nancy Fraser, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Russell has gathered an impressive chorus of philosophical voices that reexamine the origins and complexities of neo-pragmatism. The contributors discuss the relationship of pragmatism and literary theory, phenomenology, existentialism, and the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. They question the meaning of pragmatics, what it is to be practical, and ask provocative questions such as: what is reading? and whether democracy is a precondition for the functioning of intelligence. This work places this reemergent and interesting neo-development in its proper context and will provide readers with a strong sense of the movement's foundations, history, and subtlities.
