Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses

American pragmatism is premised on the notion that to find out what something means, look to fruits rather than roots. But, as Paul Grimstad shows, the thought of the classical pragmatists is itself the fruit of earlier experiments in American literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and (contemporaneously with the flowering of pragmatism) Henry James, each in their different ways prefigure at the level of literary form what emerge as the guiding ideas of classical pragmatism. Specifically, this occurs in the way an experimental approach to composition informs the classical pragmatists' central idea that experience is not a matter of correspondence but of an ongoing attunement to process. The link between experience and experiment is thus for Grimstad a way of gauging the deeper intellectual history by which literary experiments--Emerson's Essays; Poe's invention of the detective story in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue;" Melville's Pierre; and Henry James's late style--find their philosophical expression in classical pragmatism. Charles Peirce's notion of the "abductive" inference; William James's "radical empiricism;" and John Dewey's naturalist account of experience inform the book's readings. Experience and Experimental Writing also frames its set of claims in relation to more contemporary debates within literary criticism and philosophy that have so far not been taken up in this context: putting Richard Poirier's account of the relation of pragmatism to literature into dialogue with Stanley Cavell's inheritance of Emerson as someone decidedly not a "pragmatist;" to differences between classical pragmatists like William James and John Dewey and more recent, post-linguistic turn thinkers like Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom.

About the Author :
Paul Grimstad is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. His writing has appeared in Bookforum, the London Review of Books, n + 1, and Raritan.

Review :
"Rigorously argued, this erudite book is a search for the criteria by which literary work begins to mean. Whether he is asking how guessing and perceiving turn into valid judgments, or how the universal is embedded in the particular, Grimstad offers an exhilarating and insightful interpretation of thinking in Poe, Melville, Emerson, and Henry James, reorienting our presumptions concerning how experience fashions literary form." --Branka Arsic, author of On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson "Vigorously tracing a range of texts-not just poems and novels but also private journals, personal correspondence, reviews, essays, anecdotes, and manuscripts--Grimstad shows how literary style both registers and extends an ongoing process of reflective 'experimentation.' The result is a book that deepens debates over pragmatism and literature and, more broadly, makes a valuable contribution to discussions of literature and philosophy." --Robert Chodat, author of Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo "This is a book that deserves to be widely read. It is smart, engaging, and ambitious, and not since Cavell has Emerson been discussed with such sophistication and insight. Grimstad even manages to make the vexed notion of 'experience' appear serious again. No scholar of American philosophy and literature can afford to ignore Experience and Experimental Writing." --John Gibson, co-editor of The Literary Wittgenstein "A rare combination of conceptual breadth, sound scholarship, and inspired close reading, Grimstad's book boldly re-interprets the American literary and philosophical classics as an ongoing experiment in 'wording the world.'" --Joseph Urbas, Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities, University of Bordeaux