"A bird's life": Pragmatism in the field of twentieth -century American poetry
Item
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Title
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"A bird's life": Pragmatism in the field of twentieth -century American poetry
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:414bbbed8d0d:10312
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identifier
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10199
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Creator
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Case, Kristen,
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Contributor
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Joan Richardson
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | Philosophy | Poetry | Pragmatism | Transcendentalism
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Abstract
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This work investigates how and where the seeds of American philosophical thought, in particular of that strain of American thinking known as pragmatism, take root in the diverse field of twentieth-century American poetry. In considering the work of Marianne Moore in relation to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost in relation to Charles Sanders Peirce, William Carlos Williams in relation to John Dewey, Charles Olson in relation to Henry Thoreau, and Susan Howe in relation to William James, I have attempted to illuminate some of the far-flung resonances of pragmatist thinking with the work of very different American poets. I take my title from James' description of thought as "like a bird's life" composed of "an alternation of flights and perchings" (Principles 243). By following the flights of pragmatist thinking into the realm of poetry and poetics, I hope to trace a particular epistemology that emerges from diverse forms of American writing, one in which mind and world are understood as inseparable, and the human being is regarded as, in Thoreau's terms, "an inhabitant, or part and parcel of Nature" ("Walking" 149).;One assumption of this work is that intellectual history is most accurately figured not as a line but as an organic growth, that intellectual problems and ways of approaching them are carried like seeds from one genre, one generation, one region to another. Central to my approach is the belief that the meaning of any given work of literature resides not in "the work itself" nor merely in the mind of its readers, but rather in the interaction between reader and text, and further, that this interaction, the complex relationship between a reader and a book, constitutes a legitimate object of inquiry. This extension of the notion of what constitutes the proper object of literary studies is derived from William James' radical empiricism, which insists that "the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less, than the things themselves" (Essays x).
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
