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).

In this text Giles Gunn asks how human solidarity can be reconceived when its expressions have become increasingly exceptionalist and outmoded, and when the pressures of globalization divide as much as they unify. Drawing on the work of Williams and Henry James, John Dewey, Primo Levi, Richard Rorty and others, as well as postcolonial writings, Jewish literature of the holocaust and the cultural and religious experience of African Americans in slavery, Gunn points pragmatism in a transnational direction and shows how it can better account for the consequences of diversity.

The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom’s argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today.

In this distinguished work, which Hilton Kramer in The New York Times Book Review called "surely the best book ever written on the subject," Barbara Novak illuminates what is essentially American about American art. She highlights not only those aspects that appear indigenously in our art works, but also those features that consistently reappear over time. Novak examines the paintings of Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, William Sidney Mount, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder. She draws provocative and original conclusions about the role in American art of spiritualism and mathematics, conceptualism and the object, and Transcendentalism and the fact. She analyzes not only the paintings but nineteenth-century aesthetics as well, achieving a unique synthesis of art and literature. Now available with a new preface and an updated bibliography, this lavishly illustrated volume--featuring more than one hundred black-and-white illustrations and sixteen full-color plates--remains one of the seminal works in American art history.

In Road-Book America, Rowland A. Sherrill explores how the old picaresque tradition, embodied in such novels as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, opens to include a number of recent American texts, both fiction and nonfiction. Sketching the socially marginal, ingenuous, travelling characters common to old and new versions of the genre, Road-Book America is a wide-ranging and sophisticated discussion of the "new American picaresque", exemplified by William Least HeatMoon's Blue Highways, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy, Bill Moyers's Listening to America, E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, and hundreds of other narratives published in the past four decades. Open, resilient, adaptable, and perennially hopeful, the protagonist of the new American picaresque follows a therapeutic path for the alienated modern self and lays the groundwork for spiritual renewal.

American Lonesome: The Work of Bruce Springsteen begins with a visit to the Jersey Shore and ends with a meditation on the international legacy of Springsteen’s writing, music, and performances. Gavin Cologne-Brookes’s innovative study of this popular musician and his position in American culture blends scholarship with personal reflection, providing both an academic examination of Springsteen’s work and a moving account of how it offers a way out of emotional solitude and the potential lonesomeness of modern life. Cologne-Brookes proposes that the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, which assesses the value of ideas and arguments based on their practical applications, provides a lens for understanding the diversity of perspectives and emotions encountered in Springsteen’s songs and performances. Drawing on pragmatist philosophy from William James to Richard Rorty, Cologne-Brookes examines Springsteen’s formative environment and outsider psychology, arguing that the artist’s confessed tendency toward a self-reliant isolation creates a tension in his work between lonesomeness and community. He considers Springsteen’s portrayals of solitude in relation to classic and contemporary American writers, from Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson to Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates. As part of this critique, he discusses the difference between escapist and pragmatic romanticism, the notion of multiple selves as played out both in Springsteen’s work and in our perception of him, and the impact of performances both recorded and live. By drawing on his own experiences seeing Springsteen perform—including on tours showcasing the album The River in 1981 and 2016—Cologne-Brookes creates a book about the intimate relationship between art and everyday life. Blending research, cultural knowledge, and creative thinking, American Lonesome dissolves any imagined barriers between the study of a songwriter, literary criticism, and personal testimony.

This broad introduction to Colonial American literatures brings outthe comparative and transatlantic nature of the writing of thisperiod and highlights the interactions between native, non-scribalgroups, and Europeans that helped to shape early Americanwriting. Situates the writing of this period in its various historicaland cultural contexts, including colonialism, imperialism,diaspora, and nation formation. Highlights interactions between native, non-scribal groups andEuropeans during the early centuries of exploration. Covers a wide range of approaches to defining and reading earlyAmerican writing. Looks at the development of regional spheres of influence inthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Serves as a vital adjunct to Castillo and Schweitzer’s‘The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology’(Blackwell Publishing, 2001).