Thinking Across the American Grain

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.