Contingency Blues - The Search for Foundations in American Criticism

This excellent book, sharply and helpful mediates the recent debates sparked by pragmatist attacks on foundationalism over the 'legitimation crisis' of modernity, and it shows, as no book has done, the specific relevance of these debates to American cultural criticism since Emerson. Part intellectual history, part cultural critique, this provocative book is an effort to shake American thought out of the grip of the nineteenth century-and out of its contingency blues.

About the author

Paul Jay is associate professor of English at Loyola University of Chicago. He is the author of The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981, and Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes.

Summary

Paul Jay focuses his analysis on two strands of American criticism. The first attempts to revive what Jay insists is an anachronistic pragmatism derived from Emerson, James and Dewey. The second tends to reduce American criticism to a metadiscourse about the contingent grounds of knowledge.

Product details

• Authors: Paul Jay
• Publisher: The University of Wisconsin Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 04.11.2004
• EAN: 9780299154141
• ISBN: 978-0-299-15414-1
• No. of pages: 234
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 228 mm x 13 mm
• Weight: 322 g
• Series: Wisconsin Project on American; Wisconsin project on American writers; Wisconsin Project on American Writers S.; Wisconsin Project on American
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies