- Pragmatism Working Group
- A conversation with Elisa Tamarkin and Steven Meyer (facilitated by Kate Stanley)
- March 27, 2023
- 3:30 - 5PM
- Contact Email: bevans@english.rutgers.edu
- Registration Link
- In Spring 2023, the Pragmatism Working Group will be hosting series of conversations with old friends of the group to talk about new work in the field from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. As one might expect given shared interests, there is remarkable overlap in topics covered by our guests, and yet there is also something of a structural hole between disciplines. The idea behind the conversation series is to try to creatively bridge that gap. How do these new studies register across fields? What are the common threads of interest? What lines of resistance or continuity develop when cutting between them? Where might interesting new strands of conversation lead?
Location: Zoom
Steven Meyer, University of Washington, St. Louis, co-directed the Pragmatism Working Group from 2019 to 2021, during which time we undertook a survey of the work of Alfred North Whitehead. In addition to his writings on Emerson, James, Stein, Whitehead and Wittgenstein, Meyer is the recent editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science (2018), and he is at work on books on the James and Whitehead, as well as on the poetry of Jay Wright.
Kate Stanley, teaches English at Western University, Canada. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, philosophy, and culture, with an emphasis on the modernist period. Her first book, Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson (Cambridge 2018), traces an aesthetics of surprise through the work of major modernist writers and pragmatist philosophers. With Kristen Case, she is editing a new volume, William James and Literary Studies, for Cambridge.
Co-Conveners:
Brad Evans, a co-founder of the CCA Pragmatism Working Group in 2016, is a specialist in 19th and 20th century American literature with a background in the history of anthropology. In his recent book, Ephemeral Bibelots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism, he uncovered the relational predilections of a diverse cadre of writers and artists who played a role in a largely forgotten and strangely unpredictable craze for proto-modernist little magazines in the U.S. at the end of 1800s.
Elisa Tamarkin, Berkeley, English, has agreed to co-conduct the year’s activities. We will be discussing her second book, Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance, out last July with the University of Chicago Press. She is now turning to Melville and questions of "questions of visibility and consciousness in literature, art, and life."
To be added to our mailing list and receive registration information (for Zoom links), please email Brad Evans, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
