In Thinking Across the American Grain Giles Gunn makes a major contribution to the current revival of pragmatism in America by showing how it provides the most critically resilient and constructive response to the intellectual challenges of postmodernism. Gunn reclaims and refurbishes elements of the pragmatic tradition that either have been lost or have undergone important changes and shows how newer critical approaches have strong roots in the pragmatic tradition. For Gunn, pragmatism is no longer concerned solely with the nature of knowledge and the meaning of truth. Because of its insistence on critical self-awareness, its opposition to closed systems of thought, and its concern with the ethical, political, and practical contexts of ideas, pragmatism offers a blueprint for performing intellectual work in a world without absolutes. The world Gunn's pragmatism recognizes is one of multiple truths, unstable interpretations, and competing interests. After critically reexamining the nature and scope of the pragmatic legacy, Gunn explores the way pragmatism successfully responds to conceptual and methodological controversies, from the rebirth of ideology, the spread of interdisciplinarity, and the development of the new historicism, to the revolt against theory, the erosion of public discourse, and the problematics of American civil religion. Drawing throughout on the work of William James, Henry James, Sr., John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Poirier, Stanley Cavell, Clifford Geertz, Frank Lentricchia, Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, and others, Gunn shows that pragmatism, because it offers a way of thinking across the categories of modern intellectual specializations, is located at the intersection of these critical, and often competitive, discourses. The postmodern challenge for the pragmatist thinker is not only how to render these different discourses conversible with one another, but how to turn the salient insights of each into elements of a new democratic and critical public culture, one able to counter the twin threats of ideology and solipsism. Giles Gunn is one of our most acclaimed contemporary critics, and this broad and ambitious book is certain to become one of the central works in the current revival of critical pragmatism and cultural studies.

A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.

The celebrated poet behind such classics as “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “This Is Just to Say” presents a collection of essays about North American history. In the American Grain is, as William Carlos Williams said, “a study to try to find out for myself what the land of my more or less accidental birth might signify.” Although Williams wrote poetry and prose—and was a doctor—he was not a historian. In this book, he applies a fresh, lyrical perspective to moments in America’s past. Beginning with the bloody Erik the Red, discoverer of Greenland and father of Leif Erikson, Williams revisits episodes from history like the destruction of Tenochtitlan, the Mayflower ship’s journey to America, and the founding of Quebec, as well as the expeditions of explorers such as Christopher Columbus, Juan Ponce de León, Hernando de Soto, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Samuel de Champlain. He then moves along to events like the Salem witch trials, Daniel Boone’s discovery of Kentucky, and Aaron Burr’s romance with Jacataqua. He also discusses important figures such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln. By deconstructing America’s history and rebuilding it with a poet’s voice, Williams created “a fundamental book, essential if one proposes to come to terms with American literature” (The Times Literary Supplement).

English professor Mark Bauerlein studies the pragmatism of Emerson, James, and Peirce and its overlooked relevance for the neopragmatism of later thinkers. Bauerlein argues that those "original" pragmatists are often cited casually and imprecisely as mere precursors to contemporary intellectuals, but, in fact, many broad social and academic reforms hailed by new pragmatists were actually grounded in the "old" school.

The Rites of Identity argues that Kenneth Burke was the most deciding influence on Ralph Ellison's writings, that Burke and Ellison are firmly situated within the American tradition of religious naturalism, and that this tradition--properly understood as religious--offers a highly useful means for considering contemporary identity and mitigating religious conflict. Beth Eddy adds Burke and Ellison to a tradition of religious naturalism that traces back to Ralph Waldo Emerson but received its most nuanced expression in the work of George Santayana. Through close readings of the essays and fiction of Burke and Ellison, Eddy shows the extent to which their cultural criticisms are intertwined. Both offer a naturalized understanding of piety, explore the psychological and social dynamics of scapegoating, and propose comic religious resources. And both explicitly connect these religious categories to identity, be it religious, racial, national, ethnic, or gendered. Eddy--arguing that the most socially damaging uses of religious language and ritual are connected to the best uses that such language has to offer--finds in Burke and Ellison ways to manage this precarious situation and to mitigate religious violence through wise use of performative symbolic action. By placing Burke and Ellison in a tradition of pragmatic thought, The Rites of Identity uncovers an antiessentialist approach to identity that serves the moral needs of a world that is constantly negotiating, performing, and ritualizing changes of identity.

Ultimately, Young William James Thinking reveals how James provided a humane vision well suited to our pluralist age.