Pragmatism and American Experience

Joan Richardson is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, American Studies, and Liberal Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Her book, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 and nominated for the 2011 Grawemeyer Award in Religion.

• 1. Introduction: thirteen ways of looking at pragmatism; 2. Context: William James, into the cosmic weather; 3. Method: Charles Sanders Pierce, the call of the wild; 4. Purpose: John Dewey, the conduct of life; 5. Effects 1: Stanley Cavell, squaring the circle: transcendentalist pragmatism; 6. Effects 2: Richard Rorty, sea change and/or ironic scraping; Bibliography.

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