Poetry and PragmatismRichard 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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Reading is an acquired talent with words , which is all that reading ever can be
directly engaged with , and it involves the measured recognition that words can
do unexpected and disturbing things to you . People who vocalize their reading ...
Emerson is a nourishing source for the kind of reading whose pedagogical
career I have tried to describe , a claim that will disturb only the most benighted of
Francophile theoreticians . Given that Brower was first of all a classicist , that de
Man ...
abroad about the power of reading or of writing , especially in criticism . Reading
and writing are activities which for them require endless scruple . That is how the
activity of reading begins , how it is carried on , and why , so long as the words ...
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Poetry and pragmatism
Crítica de los usuarios - Not Available - Book VerdictStarting from the position of "linguistic skepticism,'' the view that language and the concept of truth are inadequate to the task of describing reality or containing experience, Poirer sees the ... Leer comentario completo