Instr: Jason Puskar
Office: CRT 585; 229-4517
e-mail: puskar@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: W 4:30pm-7:10pm; CRT 284
American's greatest contribution to philosophy is Pragmatism, an anti-essentialist theory of modernity that profoundly influenced the art, science, politics, and even popular culture of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Pragmatism has been praised as liberation from metaphysics and absolutism, and reviled as a corrosive source of moral relativism. Admirers sometimes claim it as an early version of deconstruction, while detractors often see it as an instrument of capitalist ideology. In tracing the history of pragmatism, this course pays special attention to three literary pragmatists whose works we will cover in some detail: Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and Ralph Ellison. It configures those writers in a broader intellectual history of pragmatist philosophy, starting with Ralph Waldo Emerson,continuing through John Dewey and William James, and ending in the present with Richard Rorty, Cornel West, Martha Nussbaum, and others. By reading three modern writers in the context of pragmatism's intellectual history, the course will explore the ways in which American literature and philosophy each came to define itself as a version of the other.
