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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... especially when these allow some modification of a point already made or the reinterpretation of a passage already discussed . On the subject of pragmatism , this is not meant to be in any way an exhaustive inquiry . It is partial , at ...
... especially in the essays in Language as Symbolic Action ( Berkeley : University of California Press , 1966 ) . 10. Similarities between Eliot's views of the relation between art and emotion and the views expressed by Clive Bell and Dora ...
... especially in Emerson , as to be unadaptable to any very particular design for change , particularly when change is confused with the attainment of material success . But it is obvious that for me the rhetoric of Emerson , and especially ...
Contenido
Introduction | 3 |
Superfluous Emerson | 37 |
The Transfiguration of Work | 79 |
Derechos de autor | |
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