William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition

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LSU Press, 2008 - 304 páginas

In William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition, David H. Evans pairs the writings of America's most intellectually challenging modern novelist, William Faulkner, and the ideas of America's most revolutionary modern philosopher, William James. Though Faulkner was dubbed an idealist after World War II, Evans demonstrates that Faulkner's writing is deeply connected to the emergence of pragmatism as an intellectual doctrine and cultural force in the early twentieth century.
Tracing pragmatism to its very roots, Evans examines the nineteenth-century confidence man of antebellum literature as the original practitioner of the pragmatic principle that a belief can give rise to its own objects. He casts this figure as the missing link between Faulkner and James, giving him new prominence in the prehistory of pragmatism. Moving on to Jamesian pragmatism, Evans contends that James's central innovation was his ability to define truth in narrative terms -- just as the confidence man did -- as something subjective and personal that continually shapes reality, rather than a set of static, unchanging facts.
In subsequent chapters Evans offers detailed interpretations of three of Faulkner's most important novels, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and The Hamlet, revealing that Faulkner, too, saw truth as fluid. By avoiding conclusion and finality, these three novels embody the pragmatic belief that life and the world are unstable and constantly evolving. Absalom, Absalom! stages a conflict of historical discourses that -- much like the pragmatic concept of truth -- can never be ultimately resolved. Evans shows us how Faulkner explores the conventional and arbitrary status of racial identity in Go Down, Moses, in a way that is strikingly similar to James's criticism of the concept of identity in general. Finally, Evans reads The Hamlet, a work that is often used to support the idea that Faulkner is opposed to modernity, as a depiction of a distinctly pragmatic and modern world.
With its creative coupling of James's philosophy and Faulkner's art, Evans's lively, engaging book makes a bold contribution to Faulkner studies and studies of southern literature.

 

Índice

The Confidence Man as Protopragmatist
39
William James and the Transaction of Confidence
73
Making Community in The Hamlet
102
Pragmatic Historiography and Absalom Absalom
143
Pathfinding and Providence in Go Down Moses
193
A Future for Faulkner
235
Notes
237
Index
279
Direitos de autor

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Passagens conhecidas

Página 63 - The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland .beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.
Página 3 - The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.
Página 64 - Over the burning marie, not like those steps On Heaven's azure; and the torrid clime Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire : Nathless he so endured till on the beach Of that inflamed sea he stood, and called His legions, angel forms, who lay entranced, Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades, High over-arched, embower...
Página 48 - Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before ; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.
Página 49 - I therefore put myself as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading.

Acerca do autor (2008)

David H. Evans is an associate professor of American literature at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. His work has appeared in Mississippi Quarterly, Cambridge Quarterly, Arizona Quarterly, and elsewhere.

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