Presenting pragmatist humanism as a form of anti-authoritarianism, this book sheds light on the contemporary significance of pragmatist aesthetics and the revival of humanism. This interdisciplinary study shows that a mediation between pragmatist aesthetics – which emphasizes the significance of creating, making, and inventing – and Marxist materialist aesthetics – which values form – promises interesting results and that the former can learn from the latter. In doing so, Ulf Schulenberg discusses 3 layers of the multi-layered phenomenon that is the revival of humanism: He first explains the potential of a pragmatist humanism, clarifying the contemporary significance of humanism. He then argues that pragmatist humanism is a form of anti-authoritarianism. Finally, he shows the possibility of bringing together the resurgence of humanism and a renewed interest in the work of aesthetic form by arguing that pragmatist aesthetics needs a more complex conception of form. Establishing a transatlantic theoretical dialogue, Humanism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Literary Aesthetics brings together literary and aesthetic theory, philosophy, and intellectual history. It discusses a broad range of authors – from Emerson, Whitman, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Dewey to Wittgenstein, Lukács, Adorno, Jameson, Latour, and Rorty – to illuminate how humanism, pragmatism, and anti-authoritarianism are interlinked.
Pragmatism is a humanist philosophy. In spite of the much-debated renaissance of pragmatism, however, a detailed discussion of the relationship between pragmatism and humanism is still a desideratum. It is difficult to understand the complexity of pragmatism without considering the significance of humanism. At least since the 1970s, humanism, mostly in its liberal version, has been vehemently attacked and criticized. In pragmatism, however, a particular understanding of humanism has persisted. Bringing literary studies, philosophy, and intellectual history together and establishing a transatlantic theoretical dialogue, Pragmatism and Poetic Agency endeavors to elucidate this persistence of humanism. Schulenberg continues the thought-provoking argument he developed in his previous two monographs by advancing the idea that one can only grasp the unique contemporary significance of pragmatism when one realizes how pragmatism, humanism, anti-authoritarianism, and postmetaphysics are interlinked. If one appreciates the implications and consequences of this link, then one is in a position to see pragmatism’s antifoundationalist and antirepresentationalist story of progress and emancipation as continuing the project of the Enlightenment.
In The Difference Aesthetics Makes cultural critic Kandice Chuh asks what the humanities might be and do if organized around what she calls “illiberal humanism” instead of around the Western European tradition of liberal humanism that undergirds the humanities in their received form. Recognizing that the liberal humanities contribute to the reproduction of the subjugation that accompanies liberalism's definition of the human, Chuh argues that instead of defending the humanities, as has been widely called for in recent years, we should radically remake them. Chuh proposes that the work of artists and writers like Lan Samantha Chang, Carrie Mae Weems, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Allan deSouza, Monique Truong, and others brings to bear ways of being and knowing that delegitimize liberal humanism in favor of more robust, capacious, and worldly senses of the human and the humanities. Chuh presents the aesthetics of illiberal humanism as vital to the creation of sensibilities and worlds capable of making life and lives flourish.
"Oser examines the twentieth-century literary clash between a dogmatically relativist modernism and a robust revival of Christian humanism. Reviewing English literature from Chaucer to Beckett, and the thoughts of philosophers, theologians, and modern literary critics, Oser challenges the assumption that Christian orthodoxy is incompatible with humanism, freedom, and democracy"--Provided by publisher.
The intellectual trends Good discusses include what he calls the New Sectarianism, which rejects individuality in favour of collective identities based on race, gender, and sexual preference; Presentism, which rejects the notion of history as a continuous narrative in favour of seeing the past as interpretable in any way that suits the political interests of the present; and a "hermeneutic of suspicion," in which literary texts are seen as masks for discreditable political motives. Good demonstrates that these trends culminate in the prison-like "carceral" vision of Michel Foucault and his followers: the view that culture is ideology and that culture does not free humans but incarcerates them. Good contrasts this view with the liberal vision of culture and society represented by Northrop Frye, concluding with an analysis of the relationship between anti-humanist theory among academics and the managerial practices of university administrations, which, he argues, neglect or reject basic humanistic values such as free individuality, aesthetic greatness, and autonomous inquiry.
The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature provides readers with a comprehensive reassessment of the value of humanism in an intellectual landscape. Offering contributions by leading international scholars, this volume seeks to define literature as a core expressive form and an essential constitutive element of newly reformulated understandings of humanism. While the value of humanism has recently been dominated by anti-humanist and post-humanist perspectives which focused on the flaws and exclusions of previous definitions of humanism, this volume examines the human problems, dilemmas, fears, and aspirations expressed in literature, as a fundamentally humanist art form and activity. Divided into three overarching categories, this companion will explore the histories, developments, debates, and contestations of humanism in literature, and deliver fresh definitions of "the new humanism" for the humanities. This focus aims to transcend the boundaries of a world in which human life is all too often defined in terms of restrictions—political, economic, theological, intellectual—and lived in terms of obedience, conformity, isolation, and fear. The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature will provide invaluable support to humanities students and scholars alike seeking to navigate the relevance and resilience of humanism across world cultures and literatures.
brought on by advances in technological communication, intellectual specialization, and cultural sensitivity -- has eroded the former primacy of the humanities, Edward Said argues that a more democratic form of humanism -- one that aims to incorporate, emancipate, and enlighten --
The drive to overcome nature is a projection of the anxiety about succumbing to our own nature. Inevitably, this conflict creates a vicious circle. For in subduing nature to our technical goals - themselves arranged so that our human frailty is to be overcome - we end up destroying the world in which we must live. Of late, we have begun to recognize this viciousness, both in our acts and more profoundly, in our thoughts. Yet the attempt to lose our nature by losing Nature holds an even deeper conflict: "The most effective means of escaping spiritual trial is to become spiritless, and the sooner the better. If only taken care of in time, everything takes care of itself." (Kierkegaard, 1844). Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of forty books on ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, health and social theory, and more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was a professor in the interdisciplinary human sciences for two decades. "The Penumbra of Personhood is not only the cumulative effect and expression of the primordial characters of Dasein, flung along with my being into the world," writes the author, "it is also the most graceful and eloquent response to the unknown that we possess. It is, in its own thrown essence, the fullest divergence from any violence of the reactionary or technique of the manager. It is objectively what we are and thus what we have to offer our own time." Ironically, the State has to contend not with history, the writing of which it mainly controls, but rather morality, part of the pre-State metaphysics and a version of collective human vanity that also claims to be timeless. If it is at first striking that even in our time, morality has retained such a hold, on second glance it is at least not surprising. It has ironically become the weapon of the private person, and this is very much against its own cosmogonical backdrop. Morality is shared, as is belief that the one stems from the other, and in this they are quite unlike either ethics or opinion, also having become the pedestal upon which any demagogue can be placed. The uttering of a "higher law" betrays the moralist at every turn. Even if the State can delicately navigate these potentially dangerous currents while affording to ignore mere moral editorializing - an inevitable whirlpool in any democracy at least - if enough "private" people recognize that their misgivings are shared, morality can once again assume a vestige of its former mantle. It becomes a rip-tide of conventional "wisdom" against which this or that elected regime may ride or be ridden over. If this is the most vulgar expression of Dasein's will to life, and even ontically, will to freedom, then it cannot be ignored by the reflective person. It is the final avenue of appeal in a rationalist social organization. Equipped with its own divinity, morality finds that it still has some suasion in the courts, certainly within many families, and in the schools. It is society's "back door man," to use an old Blues phrase, to point up its consistent vulgarity.
Psychologist, philosopher, teacher, writer-William James stood closer than any other thinker to the center of the confluence of intellectual and artistic forces that defined the culture of modernism. The outstanding feature of this volume lies in its intent to investigate James's influence on both American and International Modernism. It provides, on the one hand, a multifaceted introduction to students of history, philosophy, and culture, and on the other, a compendium of some of the most up-to-date thinking on this central figure. James's first book, Principles of Psychology (1890) immediately established James as the leading psychologist of his time, at a moment in history when psychology seemed to offer the promise of finding some definitive answers to eternal philosophical conundra. James's innovations would register a clear effect on much modernist art, most evidently in the stylistic prose experiments of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and their imitators. James's tentative skepticism concerning the concept of consciousness as such, and the post-Cartesian ego that was its foundation, also anticipates the questioning of the subject that would be the theme of much modern, and indeed postmodern thought. The contributors to this volume explore James's most essential texts as well as his influence on contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers. The final section is a glossary of James's key terms, with entries written by leading experts.
