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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... give up something or someone to an enemy . Always working inside each word , to the extent allowed by the ongoing momentum of his sentences , he characteristi- cally declines to separate out the word's conflicting con- notations . To do ...
... give pleasure . In order to take advantage of this , readers must learn to do for themselves some version of the ... gives an Emersonian twist to distinctions made in our own THE TRANSFIGURATION of Work 97.
... Give an An- swer , " reports that " great Pan is dead . " Echoing this , while paraphrasing a passage in Jean Paul of 1796-97 , Nerval says " God is dead ! Heaven is empty - Weep , children , you no longer have a father . " It is not ...
Contenido
Introduction | 3 |
The Transfiguration of Work 79 ཥི | 129 |
The Example of Hum 6 | 171 |
Derechos de autor | |
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