Thinking Across The American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, And The New Pragmatism,New

Product DescriptionIn Thinking Across the American Grain Giles Gunn makes amajor contribution to the current revival of pragmatism inAmerica by showing how it provides the most criticallyresilient and constructive response to the intellectualchallenges of postmodernism.Gunn reclaims and refurbishes elements of the pragmatictradition that either have been lost or have undergoneimportant changes and shows how newer critical approacheshave strong roots in the pragmatic tradition. For Gunn,pragmatism is no longer concerned solely with the nature ofknowledge and the meaning of truth. Because of itsinsistence on critical selfawareness, its opposition toclosed systems of thought, and its concern with the ethical,political, and practical contexts of ideas, pragmatism offersa blueprint for performing intellectual work in a worldwithout absolutes. The world Gunn's pragmatism recognizes isone of multiple truths, unstable interpretations, andcompeting interests.After critically reexamining the nature and scope of thepragmatic legacy, Gunn explores the way pragmatismsuccessfully responds to conceptual and methodologicalcontroversies, from the rebirth of ideology, the spread ofinterdisciplinarity, and the development of the newhistoricism, to the revolt against theory, the erosion ofpublic discourse, and the problematics of American civilreligion. Drawing throughout on the work of William James,Henry James, Sr., John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, W. E. B. DuBois, Richard Poirier, Stanley Cavell, Clifford Geertz, FrankLentricchia, Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, andothers, Gunn shows that pragmatism, because it offers a wayof thinking across the categories of modern intellectualspecializations, is located at the intersection of thesecritical, and often competitive, discourses. The postmodernchallenge for the pragmatist thinker is not only how torender these different discourses conversible with oneanother, but how to turn the salient insights of each intoelements of a new democratic and critical public culture, oneable to counter the twin threats of ideology and solipsism.Giles Gunn is one of our most acclaimed contemporary critics,and this broad and ambitious book is certain to become one ofthe central works in the current revival of criticalpragmatism and cultural studies.About the AuthorGiles Gunn is a professor of English and Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism and The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture.