The beautiful changes: Pragmatism, aesthetics, and community in American poetics, 1860--1960

American philosophy has been accessible to poets as a set of ideas that fluctuates in significance from generation to generation, yet recent literary historiography has articulated pragmatism as a limited philosophical movement that affected a small circle of American moderns. My project demonstrates that pragmatism operates in much wider trajectories than this traditional narrative suggests, and in quite different ways as well: not as a direct echo of pragmatist tenets, but as a complementary cultural effort engaged in the same problems that gave rise to pragmatist writings.; Chapter One (“The Beautiful Changes: Aesthetic Philosophy and Pragmatist Poetics”) reveals how the American pragmatism of William James, John Dewey, G. H. Mead, and Richard Rorty deploys traditionally private forms of aesthetic experience to serve communal ends. Chapter Two (“Something Added, Beyond: The Pragmatist Poetics of Walt Whitman”) argues that Walt Whitman initiates the aesthetics of pragmatism combining, through a hermeneutic of “addition,” different discursive procedures, as well as helps to shape James's own attitudes in fundamental ways. Chapter Three (“A Fit Haven: Marianne Moore and the Aesthetics of Community”), the first of two chapters exploring pragmatism and modernism, examines the work of Marianne Moore as participating in the radical development of aesthetic understanding during the late 1910s through early 1930s by attempting to realign what was perceived as an ailing American culture by Deweyan aesthetic experience. Chapter Four (“William Carlos Williams and American Propaganda”) contends that Williams's work during the 1930s and 1940s simultaneously courts and deflects strategies of propaganda to engage with the darker side of aesthetic instrumentalism: its potential exploitation by forces of political power. Chapter Five (“A Surprising Violence: The Reactionary Pragmatism of Frank O'Hara”) maintains that O'Hara's poetry evokes a pragmatist creed of experiential immediacy and loss of representation that eventually resurfaces as a form of de-humanization and control. Chapter Six (“Genealogical Economies: Pragmatist Criticism and the Problem of Inheritance, Including Notes on A. R. Ammons”) declaims the trope of the genealogy in pragmatist historiography and attempts to rearticulate pragmatism as an “economy,” a related but more liberated metaphorical framework provided by the pragmatist texts themselves.