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Die Suche erzielte 3 Treffer.

Pragmatism’s Tragicomic Jazzman Beitrag open-access

A Talk with Cornel West

Miriam Strube

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Jahrgang 58 (2014), Ausgabe 2, Seite 291 - 301

In this conversation Cornel West, one of the most versatile and provocative neo-pragmatists, discusses the social, political, and cultural foundations for pragmatism, going back to what he calls the spiritual godfathers, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He also explores his own version, prophetic pragmatism, as a form of cultural criticism and social activism that is foremost concerned with everyday people and the underserved. In this context he turns less to classical pragmatists and more to Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Josiah Royce as well as to Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, and Toni Morrison, whom he sees as sharing elements of either his tragicomic or his anti-imperialist version of pragmatism. Beyond offering insights into philosophical and literary writers, he talks about pragmatist philosophy in policy making and politics, especially in regard to Barack Obama, and about popular culture. West here considers jazz as both symbolic democratic action and pragmatic in being flexible, fluid, and not tied to dogma but to a Love Supreme.


“The bread of life is better than any soufflé” Beitrag open-access

Wallace Stevens’s Poetics and the Extraordinary Ordinary

Miriam Strube

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Jahrgang 58 (2014), Ausgabe 2, Seite 259 - 278

This essay begins with asking why the ‘studies of the everyday’—currently so popular in the humanities—have not yet taken pragmatism into consideration despite the fact that pragmatism has traditionally been concerned with the everyday, the common, and the ordinary. It then analyzes Wallace Stevens’s everyday poetics as part of the pragmatist tradition, especially as inspired by William James and John Dewey. This perspective helps to see the paradoxical doubleness involved when the ordinary is observed consciously and thus ceases to be ordinary, as it is turned into something extraordinary. Furthermore, it uncovers Stevens’s treatment of the ordinary as an expression of his political belief. Through this belief Stevens not only emphasizes democratic impulses but also the importance of becoming a part of an egalitarian collectivity.


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