Panel Title: Pragmatism and Beyond: William James and the Aesthetics of Realist and Modernist Fiction
Panel Description
In concert with an initiative by the William James Society to broaden scholarly interest in the work of William James, this panel will examine James relationship to fiction. It brings together scholars whose approaches to James extend from, and also redirect, recent threads in literary scholarship concentrating on James' pragmatism within American poetics.
James has long had an outsized influence beyond the fields of philosophy and psychology. A touchstone for our work is the recently co-edited publication by Martin Halliwell and Joel D.S. Ramussen, William James and the Transatlantic Conversation (2014). Since only one chapter in the collection discusses James’ relation to literature, we see our panel addressing a similar transatlantic audience but opening new intersections between James and literary studies.
Within literary studies, our panel will be distinguished by extending and transforming two of the central conversations most often associated with James, modernism and pragmatism. The former site resonates as a traditional location to find James in conversation with questions of aesthetics, as in Ross Posnack’s The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (1991) and Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007). More recently, scholarly threads tracing pragmatism as an influential discourse of American writing and literature include Joan Richardson’s Pragmatism and American Experience: An Introduction (2014) and her A Natural History of Pragmatism (2006).
Our panel will push these conversations in new directions, in part by extending them beyond the James-pragmatism-modernism-
We’ll begin with Laura Bilhimer’s paper, which draws in part upon James’ essay “Blindness in Human Beings” in addition to Pragmatism. In a twist, she takes seriously the idea that, as Rebecca West put it, James wrote philosophy “as though it were fiction.” With James’ admission that Eliot’s Middlemarch was “fuller of human stuff than any novel that was ever written,” she contends that Eliot’s major fictive works were important influences in James’ pragmatist ethics. Drawing on examples from Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, she reads Eliot’s major social novels beside James’ post-representational philosophy of pragmatism. In doing so, Bilhimer inverts the norm of reading James in order to explicate or contextualize a literary object. In claiming the protagonists of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda are “pragmatic,” she asserts that they, like James, struggle to live meaningfully after the abandonment of grounded knowledge: they struggle in concrete ways to be moral, useful, and empathetic to others.
Following Bilhimer, Dr. Todd Barosky will examine James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience from the perspective of an earlier moment in the nineteenth century. Premised upon how James locates the origins of religion in the ways human consciousness achieves “a sense of reality” that transcends ordinary sensory experience, Dr. Barosky argues that, for James, religion manifests as an aesthetic problem before it becomes an object of study for the psychologist. Working out the notion that aesthetic forms might bear traces of religious experiences, Dr. Barosky tests the idea against a literary form often defined by its repudiation of religion as a source of aesthetic inspiration: the nineteenth-century realist novel. Building on recent work by Gregory Jackson, who in The Word and Its Witness (2009) seeks to recover the spiritual dimensions of American realism, Dr. Barosky turns to William Dean Howells' novels Annie Kilburn and A Hazard of New Fortunes, which Howells composed after suffering an acute spiritual crisis. Dr. Barosky contends they’re shaped by, in James’ words, “a belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” He argues that this “unseen order” manifests itself in the temporality of Howells’ narratives, which situate the dense materiality of the present within a providential historicity that figures moments of individual purgation as a prophecy of social regeneration.
Dr. Robin Blyn’s paper inquires into the ways Gertrude Stein’s novella Melanctha critically adapts James’ neurological redefinition of feeling in Principles of Psychology. James suggests here that feeling does not have a content, but is rather a technology that potentiates new patterns of thought through its apprehension of relations. It’s a process James finds difficult to explain, and Dr. Byln argues that Stein’s Melanctha finds a grammar and language that approximates those Jamesian feelings of relation that allow thought to take place. Reading Stein’s neural aesthetic alongside James’ Principles, she argues that education itself hinges on the process by which feeling opens pathways to the apprehension of the new. Her paper necessarily intervenes in contemporary debates in affect studies, shifting attention away from the James-Lange theory to sites in The Principles of Psychology. There, building on the emergent science of neurology, James offers a description of the work of feeling as a precognitive operation that predisposes the mind to thought. Dr. Blyn argues, however, that when Stein appropriates this view she reveals a more complex feedback loop between feeling and thought. While feeling continues to facilitate a predisposition to new thoughts and ideas, it does so by re-contextualizing what the subject already knows. As Stein appropriates James's view of language, Stein invents a neural aesthetics that, as Ezra Pound enjoined, "takes the language and makes it new."
Our respondent, Dr. Kristen Case, is an established scholar of James with expertise in pragmatism and American poetics. She will act as an interlocutor between poetics and fiction, and spark conversation about James’ overall relation to literary study.
James has long had an outsized influence beyond the fields of philosophy and psychology. A touchstone for our work is the recently co-edited publication by Martin Halliwell and Joel D.S. Ramussen, William James and the Transatlantic Conversation (2014). Since only one chapter in the collection discusses James’ relation to literature, we see our panel addressing a similar transatlantic audience but opening new intersections between James and literary studies.
Within literary studies, our panel will be distinguished by extending and transforming two of the central conversations most often associated with James, modernism and pragmatism. The former site resonates as a traditional location to find James in conversation with questions of aesthetics, as in Ross Posnack’s The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (1991) and Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007). More recently, scholarly threads tracing pragmatism as an influential discourse of American writing and literature include Joan Richardson’s Pragmatism and American Experience: An Introduction (2014) and her A Natural History of Pragmatism (2006).
Our panel will push these conversations in new directions, in part by extending them beyond the James-pragmatism-modernism-
We’ll begin with Laura Bilhimer’s paper, which draws in part upon James’ essay “Blindness in Human Beings” in addition to Pragmatism. In a twist, she takes seriously the idea that, as Rebecca West put it, James wrote philosophy “as though it were fiction.” With James’ admission that Eliot’s Middlemarch was “fuller of human stuff than any novel that was ever written,” she contends that Eliot’s major fictive works were important influences in James’ pragmatist ethics. Drawing on examples from Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, she reads Eliot’s major social novels beside James’ post-representational philosophy of pragmatism. In doing so, Bilhimer inverts the norm of reading James in order to explicate or contextualize a literary object. In claiming the protagonists of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda are “pragmatic,” she asserts that they, like James, struggle to live meaningfully after the abandonment of grounded knowledge: they struggle in concrete ways to be moral, useful, and empathetic to others.
Following Bilhimer, Dr. Todd Barosky will examine James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience from the perspective of an earlier moment in the nineteenth century. Premised upon how James locates the origins of religion in the ways human consciousness achieves “a sense of reality” that transcends ordinary sensory experience, Dr. Barosky argues that, for James, religion manifests as an aesthetic problem before it becomes an object of study for the psychologist. Working out the notion that aesthetic forms might bear traces of religious experiences, Dr. Barosky tests the idea against a literary form often defined by its repudiation of religion as a source of aesthetic inspiration: the nineteenth-century realist novel. Building on recent work by Gregory Jackson, who in The Word and Its Witness (2009) seeks to recover the spiritual dimensions of American realism, Dr. Barosky turns to William Dean Howells' novels Annie Kilburn and A Hazard of New Fortunes, which Howells composed after suffering an acute spiritual crisis. Dr. Barosky contends they’re shaped by, in James’ words, “a belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” He argues that this “unseen order” manifests itself in the temporality of Howells’ narratives, which situate the dense materiality of the present within a providential historicity that figures moments of individual purgation as a prophecy of social regeneration.
Dr. Robin Blyn’s paper inquires into the ways Gertrude Stein’s novella Melanctha critically adapts James’ neurological redefinition of feeling in Principles of Psychology. James suggests here that feeling does not have a content, but is rather a technology that potentiates new patterns of thought through its apprehension of relations. It’s a process James finds difficult to explain, and Dr. Byln argues that Stein’s Melanctha finds a grammar and language that approximates those Jamesian feelings of relation that allow thought to take place. Reading Stein’s neural aesthetic alongside James’ Principles, she argues that education itself hinges on the process by which feeling opens pathways to the apprehension of the new. Her paper necessarily intervenes in contemporary debates in affect studies, shifting attention away from the James-Lange theory to sites in The Principles of Psychology. There, building on the emergent science of neurology, James offers a description of the work of feeling as a precognitive operation that predisposes the mind to thought. Dr. Blyn argues, however, that when Stein appropriates this view she reveals a more complex feedback loop between feeling and thought. While feeling continues to facilitate a predisposition to new thoughts and ideas, it does so by re-contextualizing what the subject already knows. As Stein appropriates James's view of language, Stein invents a neural aesthetics that, as Ezra Pound enjoined, "takes the language and makes it new."
Our respondent, Dr. Kristen Case, is an established scholar of James with expertise in pragmatism and American poetics. She will act as an interlocutor between poetics and fiction, and spark conversation about James’ overall relation to literary study.
Panel Bios
LAURA BILHIMER is currently a doctoral student in the English department at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She earned her Bachelor’s degree with Honors at the University of Kansas. She is particularly interested in the nineteenth century social novel and its reception within the American literary and intellectual scene, with a specific interest in addressing the implications of Eliot and James’ work both within and beyond academic contexts.
TODD BAROSKY is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Martin's University in Lacey, Washington, where he teaches writing and American literature. His work has appeared in the journal Early American Literature, and he is currently working on a project that reassesses the influence of Christian mysticism on nineteenth-century American realism.
ROBIN BLYN is Professor of English at the University of West Florida. She has published widely on twentieth century and contemporary literature and culture in a variety of journals, including Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Narrative. Her first book, Freak-garde: Extraordinary Bodies and Revolutionary Art in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), explores the connections between avant-garde art practices in the U.S., the history of American capitalism, and liberal subjectivity. She is working on two book projects, one which investigates the relationship between neoliberalism and network aesthetics and another that explores the theory and art of anarchism in the U.S.
KRISTEN CASE teaches American literature at the University of Maine at Farmington. She is the author of the critical study American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House 2011) and Little Arias (New Issues, 2015), a book of poems. She is co-editor of Thoreau at Two-Hundred: Essays and Reassessments, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She has also published work (or has work forthcoming) on Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William James, including a chapter in the forthcoming book Understanding James, Understanding Modernism.
JUSTIN ROGERS-COOPER is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, where also he teaches in the Urban Studies program. His work has appeared in Mediations and International Labor and Working-Class Studies. He has forthcoming pieces in The Canadian Review of American Studies, as well as a forthcoming chapter on the intersections between the late nineteenth century novel and representations of contagion and affect. He is also the liaison for the William James Society in its efforts to expand scholarly conversation around James into new literary fields.
The WILLIAM JAMES SOCIETY (WJS) is a multidisciplinary professional society that supports the study of the life and work of William James (1842-1910) and his ongoing influence in the many fields to which he contributed. We are currently interested in expanding the society’s engagement with disciplinary fields beyond philosophy and psychology. It’s hoped that the MLA panel may anchor a special issue of the peer-reviewed, online journal William James Studies.
TODD BAROSKY is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Martin's University in Lacey, Washington, where he teaches writing and American literature. His work has appeared in the journal Early American Literature, and he is currently working on a project that reassesses the influence of Christian mysticism on nineteenth-century American realism.
ROBIN BLYN is Professor of English at the University of West Florida. She has published widely on twentieth century and contemporary literature and culture in a variety of journals, including Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Narrative. Her first book, Freak-garde: Extraordinary Bodies and Revolutionary Art in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), explores the connections between avant-garde art practices in the U.S., the history of American capitalism, and liberal subjectivity. She is working on two book projects, one which investigates the relationship between neoliberalism and network aesthetics and another that explores the theory and art of anarchism in the U.S.
KRISTEN CASE teaches American literature at the University of Maine at Farmington. She is the author of the critical study American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House 2011) and Little Arias (New Issues, 2015), a book of poems. She is co-editor of Thoreau at Two-Hundred: Essays and Reassessments, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She has also published work (or has work forthcoming) on Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William James, including a chapter in the forthcoming book Understanding James, Understanding Modernism.
JUSTIN ROGERS-COOPER is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, where also he teaches in the Urban Studies program. His work has appeared in Mediations and International Labor and Working-Class Studies. He has forthcoming pieces in The Canadian Review of American Studies, as well as a forthcoming chapter on the intersections between the late nineteenth century novel and representations of contagion and affect. He is also the liaison for the William James Society in its efforts to expand scholarly conversation around James into new literary fields.
The WILLIAM JAMES SOCIETY (WJS) is a multidisciplinary professional society that supports the study of the life and work of William James (1842-1910) and his ongoing influence in the many fields to which he contributed. We are currently interested in expanding the society’s engagement with disciplinary fields beyond philosophy and psychology. It’s hoped that the MLA panel may anchor a special issue of the peer-reviewed, online journal William James Studies.
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