Pragmatic modernism and the politics of recontextualization (William James, John Dewey, Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes)

This dissertation claims that the relative invisibility of the pragmatist strain in American modernism is indicative of a set of assumptions not only about modernism but about literary and cultural politics more generally. I argue that the dominance of avant-garde literary and theoretical traditions within histories of modernism has rendered illegible alternative forms of innovative or radical artistic work and has obscured a range of navigations between the aesthetic and the social that do not share the “oppositional” tendencies of the avant-garde. Because American modernism is so often read by way of this European avant-garde tradition, the innovations it shares with pragmatism's “recontextualizing” mode of thought have been largely suppressed.; By tracing a new branch of American modernism I refer to as “pragmatic modernism,” I reanimate the sophisticated theorizations of the recontextualizing mode embodied in the writings of William James, John Dewey, Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In so doing, I not only suggest a new genealogy of modernism but a new critical mode as well, one that is attentive to literary nuance, to historical and political contexts, and to the institutional and social position of academic critics. I seek to establish a network of preoccupations that are limited neither by discipline nor (as has been the case in the past) by their relevance to the merely aesthetic or the purely social.; My dissertation thus treats the aesthetic as a category to be explored in the full richness of its social implications. But it also suggests an overlooked cultural and social matrix within which we might read works of various disciplines during the first decades of the twentieth century. Ultimately, I suggest that an examination of recontextualizing rather than oppositional modes of critical thought might yield a new sense of what is radical or innovative in American modernism, and might offer a new sense of the political judgments and cultural values such innovation entails.