Contingency Blues

by Jay, Paul

• ISBN13: 9780299154103
• ISBN10: 0299154106
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-04-15
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

Paul Jay focuses his analysis on two strands of American criticism. The first, which includes Richard Poirier and Giles Gunn, has attempted to revive what Jay insists is an anachronistic pragmatism derived from Emerson, James, and Dewey. The second, represented most forcefully by Richard Rorty, tends to reduce American criticism to a metadiscourse about the contingent grounds of knowledge. In chapters on Emerson, Whitman, Santayana, Van Wyck Brooks, Dewey, and Kenneth Burke, Jay examines the historical roots of these two positions, which he argues are marked by recurrent attempts to reconcile transcendentalism and pragmatism. A forceful rejection of both kinds of revisionism, Contingency Blues locates an alternative in the work of the "border studies" critics, those who give our interest in contingency a new, more concrete form by taking an historical, cultural, and anthropological approach to the invention of literature, subjectivity community and culture in a pan-American context.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	3	(17)
1. Modernity and Nature in Emerson	20	(22)
2. Emerson, Whitman, and the Problem of Culture	42	(15)
3. George Santayana and Van Wyck Brooks: Pragmatism and the Genteel Tradition	57	(24)
4. John Dewey: Pragmatism, Modernism, and Aesthetic Criticism	81	(28)
5. Kenneth Burke: Modernism and the Motives of Rhetoric	109	(33)
Conclusion: Rhetoric, Neopragmatism, Border Studies--Beyond the Contingency Blues	142	(41)
Notes	183	(27)
Works Cited	210	(7)
Index	217