Romanticism and Pragmatism Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture

Romanticism and Pragmatism offers a new and original perspective by elucidating how pragmatism, humanism, anti-authoritarianism, and postmetaphysics are linked, and is the first monograph to offer a detailed discussion of Richard Rorty's idea of a literary or poeticized culture. It argues that pragmatism's use of Romanticism is an integral part of a modern antifoundationalist story of progress, and that it can help us appreciate the significance of Romanticism in the twenty-first century. It also analyses the relation between pragmatism and race (and cosmopolitanism), and approaches the question of a pragmatist literary ethics.

Ulf Schulenberg is a Visiting Professor of American Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. He is the author of Zwischen Realismus und Avantgarde: Drei Paradigmen für die Aporien des Entweder-Oder (2000) and Lovers and Knowers: Moments of the American Cultural Left (2007), as well as the co-editor of Americanization-Globalization-Education (2003). He has published widely in the fields of literary and cultural theory, American studies, and American and European intellectual history.

Introduction
PART I: PRAGMATISM AND THE IDEA OF A LITERARY OR POETICIZED CULTURE
1. F.C.S. Schiller: Pragmatism, Humanism, and Postmetaphysics
2. Richard Rorty's Notion of a Poeticized Culture
3. Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, and the 'désir d'écrire'
PART II: FROM FINDING TO MAKING: PRAGMATISM AND ROMANTICISM
4. Books, Rocks, and Sentimental Education: Self-Culture and the Desire for the Really Real in Henry David Thoreau
5. 'Strangle the singers who will not sing you loud and strong': Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and the Idea of a Literary Culture
6. Poets, Partial Stories, and the Earth of Things: William James between Romanticism and Worldliness
7. John Dewey's Antifoundationalist Story of Progress
8. 'Toolmakers rather than discoverers': Richard Rorty's Reading of Romanticism
PART III: ETHICS, THE NOVEL, AND THE PRIVATE-PUBLIC DISTINCTION
9. Resuscitating Ethical Criticism: Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Significance of the Novel
10. John Dewey and the Moral Imagination
11. 'Redemption from Egotism': Richard Rorty, the Private-Public Distinction, and the Novel
12. 'Soucie-toi de toi-même': Michel Foucault and Etho-Poetics
PART IV: PRAGMATISM, RACE AND COSMOPOLITANISM
13. 'The myth-men are going': Richard Wright, Communism, and Cosmopolitan Humanism
14. 'Where the people can sing, the poet can live': James Baldwin, Pragmatism, and Cosmopolitan Humanism
PART V: CONCLUSION
Notes
Bibliography