"The truth about us": Pastoral, pragmatism, and Paterson

American Literature

Volumn 75, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 601-627

  Mikkelsen, Ann ^a  

^a AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949844830     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-75-3-601     Document Type: Review

References (32)

1. See Geoffrey Hartman, "Purification and Danger 1: American Poetry," Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), 117-21
2. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Hogarth, 1986), 14
3. Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: From Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 1-17
4. See also Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), 18
5. See Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992)
6. and Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964)
7. and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (1722; New York: Penguin, 1981)
8. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 2; further references to this source will be cited parenthetically as PD
9. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982), 65, 69
10. William Carlos Williams, "Yours, O Youth," Contact 3 (1921): 14
11. reprinted in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1954), 32
12. William Carlos Williams to Horace Gregory, 5 May 1944, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John Thirlwall (New York: New Directions, 1957), 224
13. John Dewey, quoted in Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 533
14. It is within this historicized context that I wish to situate the confluence of Dewey's and Williams's work, rather than viewing it through the rich body of philosophy and literary criticism oriented to pragmatism; see, for example, Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison, Wis.: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989)
15. Richard Rorty Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989)
16. Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens (Madison, Wis.: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1988)
17. and Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992)
18. For two different perspectives on this period, see James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1994)
19. and James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986)
20. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; reprint, Denver, Colo.: Alan Swallow, 1954)
21. John Dewey, "Americanism and Localism," in Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Joseph Ratner, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1929), 2:538
22. Williams, "Marianne Moore," Selected Essays, 128
23. For perspectives on "dirt" in Williams's work, see Lorna Smedman, "Skeleton in the Closet: Williams's Debt to Gertrude Stein," William Carlos Williams Review 21 (fall 1995): 21-35
24. and Meryl Altman, "The Clean and the Unclean: Williams Carlos Williams, Europe, Sex, and Ambivalence," William Carlos Williams Review 18 (spring 1992): 10-20. Smedman tends to see Williams, like Stein, as interested in filth as such, while Altman reads Williams in the conventional modernist mode, locating filth in Europe and aligning his own work with the clean elements of the New World
25. See Dickran Tashjian, William Carlos Williams and the American Scene, 1920-1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1978), 100-105. Williams's worries were not unfounded. One of his sons, for example, recalled being queried by a Rutherford townsman about his father and how those "shitty verses" of his were coming along (20)
26. William Carlos Williams, interview by John Thirlwall, Interviews with William Carlos Williams, ed. Linda Wagner (New York: New Directions, 1976), 64
27. See, for example, Harold Toliver, Pastoral Forms and Attitudes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1971)
28. and Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983)
29. "Pastoral," The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939 (New York: New Directions, 1986), 42-43
30. For a more detailed discussion of Williams's feelings regarding homosexual behavior he witnessed in Europe, for example, see Altman, "The Clean and the Unclean."
31. For a rendition of this traditional reading of the scene, see Mariani, A New World Naked, 614-17
32. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 184