Download or read book Thinking Across the American Grain written by Giles Gunn and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992-02-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Progressivism s Aesthetic Education written by Jesse Raber and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-29 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Progressive Era in the United States, as teaching became professionalized and compulsory attendance laws were passed, the public school emerged as a cultural authority. What did accepting this authority mean for Americans’ conception of self-government and their freedom of thought? And what did it mean for the role of artists and intellectuals within democratic society? Jesse Raber argues that the bildungsroman negotiated this tension between democratic autonomy and cultural authority, reprising an old role for the genre in a new social and intellectual context. Considering novels by Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside the educational thought of John Dewey, the Montessorians, the American Herbartians, and the social efficiency educators, Raber traces the development of an aesthetics of social action. Richly sourced and vividly narrated, this book is a creative intervention in the fields of literary criticism, pragmatic philosophy, aesthetic theory, and the history of education.
Download or read book American Lonesome written by Gavin Cologne-Brookes and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2018-11-14 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Lonesome: The Work of Bruce Springsteen begins with a visit to the Jersey Shore and ends with a meditation on the international legacy of Springsteen’s writing, music, and performances. Gavin Cologne-Brookes’s innovative study of this popular musician and his position in American culture blends scholarship with personal reflection, providing both an academic examination of Springsteen’s work and a moving account of how it offers a way out of emotional solitude and the potential lonesomeness of modern life. Cologne-Brookes proposes that the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, which assesses the value of ideas and arguments based on their practical applications, provides a lens for understanding the diversity of perspectives and emotions encountered in Springsteen’s songs and performances. Drawing on pragmatist philosophy from William James to Richard Rorty, Cologne-Brookes examines Springsteen’s formative environment and outsider psychology, arguing that the artist’s confessed tendency toward a self-reliant isolation creates a tension in his work between lonesomeness and community. He considers Springsteen’s portrayals of solitude in relation to classic and contemporary American writers, from Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson to Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates. As part of this critique, he discusses the difference between escapist and pragmatic romanticism, the notion of multiple selves as played out both in Springsteen’s work and in our perception of him, and the impact of performances both recorded and live. By drawing on his own experiences seeing Springsteen perform—including on tours showcasing the album The River in 1981 and 2016—Cologne-Brookes creates a book about the intimate relationship between art and everyday life. Blending research, cultural knowledge, and creative thinking, American Lonesome dissolves any imagined barriers between the study of a songwriter, literary criticism, and personal testimony.
Download or read book The Revival of Pragmatism written by Morris Dickstein and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-23 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVAn assessment, by a distinguished panel of experts, on the impact of pragmatism on contemporary thought./div
Download or read book Pastoral Pragmatism and Twentieth Century American Poetry written by A. Mikkelsen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-01-31 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Early American Writing written by Various and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-02-01 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing materials from journals and diaries, political documents and religious sermons, prose and poetry, Giles Gunn's anthology provides a panoramic survey of early American life and literature—including voices black and white, male and female, Hispanic, French, and Native American. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book Creating American Civilization written by David R. Shumway and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book William James Pragmatism and American Culture written by Deborah Whitehead and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-21 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Continues and adds to a rich conversation among American philosophers concerning the origins of pragmatism and its possibilities for the future.” —William Gavin, University of Southern Maine William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture focuses on the work of William James and the relationship between the development of pragmatism and its historical, cultural, and political roots in nineteenth-century America. Deborah Whitehead reads pragmatism through the intersecting themes of narrative, gender, nation, politics, and religion. As she considers how pragmatism helps to explain the United States to itself, Whitehead articulates a contemporary pragmatism and shows how it has become a powerful and influential discourse in American intellectual and popular culture.
Download or read book Rethinking Postmodernism s written by Katrin Amian and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking Postmodernism(s) revisits three historical sites of American literary postmodernism: the early postmodernism of Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1961), the emancipatory postmodernism of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and the late or post-postmodernism of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002). For the first time, it confronts these texts with the pragmatist philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, staging a conceptual dialogue between pragmatism and postmodernism that historicizes and recontextualizes customary readings of postmodern fiction. The book is a must-read for all interested in current reassessments of literary postmodernism, in new critical dialogues between seminal postmodern texts, and in recent attempts to theorize the ‘post-postmodern’ moment.
Download or read book Nature and Culture American Landscape and Painting 1825 1875 With a New Preface written by Barbara Novak Altschul Professor of Art History Barnard College and Columbia University (Emerita) and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007-01-05 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this richly illustrated volume, featuring more than fifty black-and-white illustrations and a beautiful eight-page color insert, Barbara Novak describes how for fifty extraordinary years, American society drew from the idea of Nature its most cherished ideals. Between 1825 and 1875, all kinds of Americans--artists, writers, scientists, as well as everyday citizens--believed that God in Nature could resolve human contradictions, and that nature itself confirmed the American destiny. Using diaries and letters of the artists as well as quotes from literary texts, journals, and periodicals, Novak illuminates the range of ideas projected onto the American landscape by painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, and Martin J. Heade, and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederich Wilhelm von Schelling. Now with a new preface, this spectacular volume captures a vast cultural panorama. It beautifully demonstrates how the idea of nature served, not only as a vehicle for artistic creation, but as its ideal form. "An impressive achievement." --Barbara Rose, The New York Times Book Review "An admirable blend of ambition, elan, and hard research. Not just an art book, it bears on some of the deepest fantasies of American culture as a whole." --Robert Hughes, Time Magazine
Download or read book Phenomenology Transversality and World Philosophy written by Hwa Yol Jung and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-03-12 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phenomenology, Transversality, and World Philosophy explores the concept of world philosophy (Weltphilosophie) to take into account the reality of today’s multicultural and globalizing world. It challenges the assumption that the particular in the West is universalizable, but the particular in the non-West is particular forever, using the concept of transversality to construct an intercontinental philosophy. In the tradition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s world literature (Weltliteratur), and in dialogue with work in ethics and political philosophy, Hwa Yol Jung examines the roles that phenomenology and transversality play in constructing world philosophy.
Download or read book Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics written by Hwa Yol Jung and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-08-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics introduces the importance of body politics from both Eastern and Western perspectives. Hwa Yol Jung begins with Giambattista Vico’s anti-Cartesianism as the birth of the discipline. He then explores the homecoming of Greek mousike (performing arts), which included oral poetry, dance, drama, and music; Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical body politics; the making of body politics in Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Luce Irigaray; Marshall McLuhan’s transversal and embodied philosophy of communication; and transversal geophilosophy. This tour de force will be an engaging read for anyone interested in the above thinkers, as well as for students and scholars of comparative philosophy, communication theory, environmental philosophy, political philosophy, or continental philosophy
Download or read book Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature written by Robert E. Abrams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative and original study, Robert E. Abrams argues that in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, new concepts of space and landscape emerge. Abrams explores the underlying frailty of a sense of place in American literature of this period. Sense of place, Abrams proposes, is culturally constructed. It is perceived through the lens of maps, ideas of nature, styles of painting, and other cultural frameworks that can contradict one another or change dramatically over time. Abrams contends that mid-century American writers ranging from Henry D. Thoreau to Margaret Fuller are especially sensitive to instability of sense of place across the span of American history, and that they are ultimately haunted by an underlying placelessness. Many books have explored the variety of aesthetic conventions and ideas that have influenced the American imagination of landscape, but this study introduces the idea of placeless into the discussion, and suggests that it has far-reaching consequences.
Download or read book American Pragmatism and Communication Research written by David K. Perry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2001 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the past, present, and potential relationships between pragmatism and communication research. For scholars and students in communication study.
Download or read book Works about John Dewey 1886 2012 written by Barbara Levine and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 1168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Works of John Dewey, 1886–2012 is an invaluable and meticulously compiled resource for the growing number of scholars and researchers seeking a deeper understanding of the work of the prominent American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. Dewey (1859–1952), an influential philosopher credited with the founding of pragmatism and also recognized as a pioneer in functional psychology and the progressive moment in education, was hailed by Life magazine in 1990 as one of the one hundred most important Americans of the twentieth century. This rich and continually expanding compendium of historical and more recent essays, research, and references is a testament to the growing interest in Dewey’s intellectual work and his measurable impact in the United States and throughout the world. In Works of John Dewey, 1886–2012, some four thousand new entries are presented in ebook format, in addition to those from earlier print and electronic editions dating back to 1995. Copies of most of the works have been obtained and are stored at the Center for Dewey Studies. For the first time, users can access all items from all editions in one user-friendly format. Jump links to alphabetical sections facilitate movement through the vast collection of entries. Users can search by keyword and author.
Download or read book Reconceptualizing American Literary Cultural Studies written by William E. Cain and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-04 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three extensively revised essays by Mailloux, an influential proponent of cultural studies, describe his approach in depth. Following are ten essays, nine of them written specifically for this volume, by scholars who offer various perspectives on Mailloux's ideas. Each essayist weighs the strengths and limitations of the cultural studies movement in general and Mailloux's approach in particular.
Download or read book Emerson s Ghosts written by Randall Fuller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-07 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is increasingly commonplace to find scholars who circle back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and his intellectual heirs as a way of better understanding contemporary social and aesthetic contexts. Why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? In this innovative study, Randall Fuller examines the way pivotal twentieth-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. He examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. An engaging institutional history of American literary studies in the twentieth century, Emerson's Ghosts reveals the unexpected convergent forces that have shaped American cultural history in lasting ways.
