Preface
The following essays do not make a sustained argument on behalf of the efficacy of an approach to literature and literary criticism I am calling “literary pragmatism.” They do attempt to show how such an approach can be grounded in the aesthetic philosophy propounded by John Dewey and can be developed in a more particular way by focusing specifically on literature than Dewey’s own synoptic focus on all the manifestations of art in Art as Experience allows. Perhaps this entails taking the pragmatic view of art in a different direction than Dewey himself might have done, or questioning the views expressed by others influenced by Dewey, but I believe that my explication of a pragmatic form of criticism remains true to the underlying principle Dewey wanted to advance—that art is indeed a singular human activity, valuable for its own sake beyond the multifarious uses to which it might be put, but that its value is to be found not in the particularity of the art object—its tangible “beauty”—but in the existential event of expanded consciousness by which the work of art makes itself known.
The first section, “John Dewey and Literary Criticism” explicates Dewey’s theory of art at length, more or less chapter by chapter. Here I am less interested in subsuming Dewey’s book to the selectivity and shapeliness of a critical essay and more concerned to elucidate the progression of Dewey’s thinking on a granular level. In this section I also attempt to show how a pragmatic conception of criticism might function as a corrective to some of the less tenable assumptions of New Criticism.
“Dewey’s Disciples” focuses on perhaps the two most important exponents of Dewey’s thought, Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish—in Rorty’s case, surely the most important philosopher to adopt (and extend) Dewey’s conception of pragmatism in the post-World War II era, while Fish formulated probably the most significant critical approach drawing on Dewey’s emphasis on the role of reader/audience in the acts of perception and interpretation—his famous “reader response” theory. In the Rorty essay, I take some exception to his somewhat superficial dismissal of “aestheticism” as it applies to the work of Vladimir Nabokov.
In “Pragmatic Applications,” I attempt to pull away even more fully from a purely explicative approach to the particulars of Art as Experience in exploring some of the implications of thinking about literature from a pragmatic perspective, first as literature might provide a beneficial model for thinking about politics (“Liberalism and Literature”) and then in a critique of what I find to be seriously deficient thinking about literature by Steven Pinker in his book, The Blank Slate. In a third essay on Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature, I discuss Attridge’s experience-based approach to teaching and reading literature in all of its “singularity” as a phenomenon of consciousness, but ultimately as well attempt to reconcile this singular raw experience as Attridge evokes it with the needs of literary criticism to describe and analyze a work of literature as an “object.”
The final essay is a response to Mary Jane Jacob’s book, Dewey for Artists, published in 2018. I have used the essay (not quite a review) to both recapitulate the core principles of Dewey’s philosophy of art as delineated in the first section and to address the misperceptions specifically of Art as Experience that I feel a book like Jacob’s could encourage. Dewey for Artists is assuredly a well-intentioned book, but its exposition of Dewey’s concept of “aesthetic experience” falls short of capturing what he really means by “aesthetic.”
Most of these essays originally appeared on my literary blog, The Reading Experience, or as articles/reviews in other publications. They are the product of my own integrated thinking about the application of pragmatism as manifested in Art as Experience to literature and literary criticism, but they, and the collection as a whole, do not possess the sort of structural rigor associated with academic criticism. Probably the content expressed in the essays would be similar if I were still an academic critic, but the presentation is necessarily more various.
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