Contingency blues
Subtitle: the search for foundations in American criticism
By: Paul Jay.
Series: The Wisconsin project on American writers
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Madison, Wis
Language: eng
Number of pages: 221
Subjects: American literature -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc.; Modernism (Literature) -- United States.; Criticism -- United States -- History.; Pragmatism.
Description: Paul Jay focuses his analysis on two strands of American criticism. The first, which includes Richard Poirier and Giles Gunn, has attempted to revive what Jay insists is an anachronistic pragmatism derived from Emerson, James, and Dewey. The second, represented most forcefully by Richard Rorty, tends to reduce American criticism to a metadiscourse about the contingent grounds of knowledge.

In chapters on Emerson, Whitman, Santayana, Van Wyck Brooks, Dewey, and Kenneth Burke, Jay examines the historical roots of these two positions, which he argues are marked by recurrent attempts to reconcile transcendentalism and pragmatism.

A forceful rejection of both kinds of revisionism, Contingency Blues locates an alternative in the work of the "border studies" critics, those who give our interest in contingency a new, more concrete form by taking an historical, cultural, and anthropological approach to the invention of literature, subjectivity community and culture in a pan-American context.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 210-216) and index.