Poetry and PragmatismHarvard University Press, 1992 - 228 páginas 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. |
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... transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious , is action . " While this is very cryptic in- deed , it helps us better understand the enormous invest- ment in the word everywhere in Emerson and in pragma- tism ...
... transition , the energizing spirit . " 12 Rely , that is to say , not on anything fixed or stabilized in your vocabulary but only on the power that allows you to move away from these , movements precipitated by desire whose object is ...
... transition from a past to a new state . " James's pragmatism looks back to the two American writers he most admired - Emerson with his transitions , Whitman with his lolling about — and forward to Frost , Stevens , and Stein . All three ...
Contenido
Introduction | 3 |
Superfluous Emerson | 37 |
The Transfiguration of Work | 79 |
Derechos de autor | |
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