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.

Presenting pragmatist humanism as a form of anti-authoritarianism, this book sheds light on the contemporary significance of pragmatist aesthetics and the revival of humanism. This interdisciplinary study shows that a mediation between pragmatist aesthetics – which emphasizes the significance of creating, making, and inventing – and Marxist materialist aesthetics – which values form – promises interesting results and that the former can learn from the latter. In doing so, Ulf Schulenberg discusses 3 layers of the multi-layered phenomenon that is the revival of humanism: He first explains the potential of a pragmatist humanism, clarifying the contemporary significance of humanism. He then argues that pragmatist humanism is a form of anti-authoritarianism. Finally, he shows the possibility of bringing together the resurgence of humanism and a renewed interest in the work of aesthetic form by arguing that pragmatist aesthetics needs a more complex conception of form. Establishing a transatlantic theoretical dialogue, Humanism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Literary Aesthetics brings together literary and aesthetic theory, philosophy, and intellectual history. It discusses a broad range of authors – from Emerson, Whitman, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Dewey to Wittgenstein, Lukács, Adorno, Jameson, Latour, and Rorty – to illuminate how humanism, pragmatism, and anti-authoritarianism are interlinked.

William James (1842–1910) is widely regarded as the founding figure of modern psychology and one of the most important philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Renowned for his philosophical theory of pragmatism and memorable turns of phrase, such as ‘stream of consciousness’ and the ‘will to believe’, he made enormous contributions to a rich array of philosophical subjects, from the emotions and free will to religion, ethics, and the meaning of life. The Jamesian Mind covers the major aspects of James’s thought, from his early influences to his legacy, with over forty chapters by an outstanding roster of international contributors. It is organized into seven parts: Intellectual Biography Psychology, Mind, and Self Ethics, Religion, and Politics Method, Truth, and Knowledge Philosophical Encounters Legacy. In these sections fundamental topics are examined, including James’s conceptions of philosophical and scientific inquiry, habit, self, free will and determinism, pragmatism, truth, and pluralism. Considerable attention is also devoted to James in relation to the intellectual traditions of empiricism and Romanticism as well as to such other philosophical schools as utilitarianism, British idealism, Logical Empiricism, and existentialism. James’s thought is also situated in an interdisciplinary context, including modernism, sociology, and politics, showcasing his legacy in psychology and ethics. An indispensable resource for anyone studying and researching James’s philosophy, The Jamesian Mind will also interest those in related disciplines such as psychology, religion, and sociology.

William Carlos Williams was an inventive writer never confined by any static genre or aesthetic postulate. In this authoritative study, Bernard Duffey recognizes that literary dynamism as he approaches the full breadth of Williams's work--including his poetry, prose, fiction, and drama--as an interrelated and interdependent web of writing. The result, the first truly comprehensive examination of a major American author and his kinetic art, will interest students and scholars of Williams, American literature, and modern poetry and criticism. Central to Duffey's study is a critical framework based on Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives and the perception of the poet as an agent working in relation to a "scene" and its content--in this case, the geographical and cultural locale that Williams clung to. Williams's work, Duffey argues, was informed by the dramatic sense of himself as a literary actor seeking embodiment of a dynamic, altering whole and his present condition of being. Ultimately, he stresses, the writer was more engaged in expressing literary action than in forging literary objects. Duffey amplifies this critical view through a close reading of specific works. Examining Williams's principal writings in the lights that seem most immediate to them, he tackles a variety of themes: the pervasiveness of scene in In the American Grain and the fiction; the role of agent or poetic person in Kora in Hell, A Voyage to Pagany, Paterson, and Pictures from Brueghel; the function of poetic agency in the short poems, and of poetic action in Williams's drama.

This book explores sentimental poetry, an often overlooked, yet significant and persuasive pre-Civil War American discourse. At a time when a woman speaking before a mixed-gender audience might be labeled "promiscuous," many women presented their views through sentimental poetry, a blend of affect with intellect.

In this surprisingly timely book, Stephen Mack examines Whitman’s particular and fascinating brand of patriotism: his far-reaching vision of democracy. For Whitman, loyalty to America was loyalty to democracy. Since the idea that democracy is not just a political process but a social and cultural process as well is associated with American pragmatism, Mack relies on the pragmatic tradition of Emerson, James, Dewey, Mead, and Rorty to demonstrate the ways in which Whitman resides in this tradition. Mack analyzes Whitman's democratic vision both in its parts and as a whole; he also describes the ways in which Whitman's vision evolved throughout his career. He argues that Whitman initially viewed democratic values such as individual liberty and democratic processes such as collective decision-making as fundamental, organic principles, free and unregulated. But throughout the 1860s and 1870s Whitman came to realize that democracy entailed processes of human agency that are more deliberate and less natural—that human destiny is largely the product of human effort, and a truly humane society can be shaped only by intelligent human efforts to govern the forces that would otherwise govern us. Mack describes the foundation of Whitman’s democracy as found in the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass, examines the ways in which Whitman’s 1859 sexual crisis and the Civil War transformed his democratic poetics in “Sea-Drift,” “Calamus,” Drum-Taps,and Sequel to Drum-Taps, and explores Whitman’s mature vision in Democratic Vistas, concluding with observations on its moral and political implications today. Throughout, he illuminates Whitman's great achievement—learning that a full appreciation for the complexities of human life meant understanding that liberty can take many different and conflicting forms—and allows us to contemplate the relevance of that achievement at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Ode Consciousness examines a preeminent literary form in its three-thousand-year history, navigating between philosophy and literature, offering cross-cultural perspectives on a poetic logic informed by polar intensities of sensuous cognition. Making a double incision on the corpus, Robert Eisenhauer interprets works by Henry Vaughan and the modernist Frank O'Hara, foregrounding the text, but also the text(-ile) message, and the dialogical weave of enunciation. The ancient Chinese ode, translated by Karlgren and estranged by Pound, anchors sentience in the flora and fauna of physical nature, and the I Jing or Book of Changes offers insights on poetry, psychoanalysis, and aleatoriness per se. The rise of the ode in the West is contemporary with that of a philosophical discourse concerning clarity and obscurity of thought. While Milton widens the esoteric scope, Lovelace concretizes ode consciousness through the image of a frozen grasshopper («green ice»), whose non-longevity is contrasted with the human capacity for survival through friendship. Translating the «Polish Horace» (Sarbiewski), Coleridge prepares the ground for the lyricism of Keats and Shelley, raising the neural stakes through passages of lingering, delay, and intoxication. A negative capability inclusive of desire as well as nihilation inhabits Jalal al-Din Rumi and the Arabic qasida. Affliction, a key concept for the Baroque, is discussed in the context of film noir, while Hegel's privileging in the Aesthetics of Schiller's «Song of the Bell» is seen as part of a larger attempt to censure the radical re-Pindarization and revolutionary retexting of the ode, most notably in Klopstock and Hölderlin. The author analyzes the role played by impersonality in Yeats's attempt to recrystallize Keatsian and Confucian sensibility through «annotated seeing» and the opening of windows of clairvoyant perception. Eisenhauer also suggests parallels between O'Hara's autumnal glimpses of New York City at the height of modernism and Keatsian sensibility. Ode Consciousness concludes by examining the return of the repressed in the graphic novels of Osamu Tezuka, thereby enriching our understanding of the ode's perennial relevance.

In this highly original book, Victor Kestenbaum calls into question the oft-repeated assumption that John Dewey's pragmatism has no place for the transcendent. Kestenbaum demonstrates that, far from ignoring the transcendent ideal, Dewey's works—on education, ethics, art, and religion—are in fact shaped by the tension between the natural and the transcendent. Kestenbaum argues that to Dewey, the pragmatic struggle for ideal meaning occurs at the frontier of the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible. Penetrating analyses of Dewey's early and later writings, as well as comparisons with the works of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michael Oakeshott, and Wallace Stevens, shed new light on why Dewey regarded the human being's relationship to the ideal as "the most far-reaching question" of philosophy. For Dewey, the pragmatic struggle for the good life required a willingness "to surrender the actual experienced good for a possible ideal good." Dewey's pragmatism helps us to understand the place of the transcendent ideal in a world of action and practice.

Arguing, humanistically, that we live in a "human world" inescapably colored by meaning, this book shows why the pursuit of meaningfulness is not ethically innocent but must be subjected to critique. Pragmatist critique of meaning both embraces critical humanism and rejects theodicies postulating ultimate meaning in suffering.