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This interdisciplinary project is situated at the boundary between literary studies and philosophy. Its chief focus is on American Romanticism and it examines work by a number of prominent writers and philosophers, from Whitman and Thoreau to Barthes and Rorty.

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Introduction PART I: PRAGMATISM AND THE IDEA OF A LITERARY OR POETICIZED CULTURE 1. F.C.S. Schiller: Pragmatism, Humanism, and Postmetaphysics 2. Richard Rorty´s Notion of a Poeticized Culture 3. Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, and the ´désir d´écrire´ PART II: FROM FINDING TO MAKING: PRAGMATISM AND ROMANTICISM 4. Books, Rocks, and Sentimental Education: Self-Culture and the Desire for the Really Real in Henry David Thoreau 5. ´Strangle the singers who will not sing you loud and strong´: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and the Idea of a Literary Culture 6. Poets, Partial Stories, and the Earth of Things: William James between Romanticism and Worldliness 7. John Dewey´s Antifoundationalist Story of Progress 8. ´Toolmakers rather than discoverers´: Richard Rorty´s Reading of Romanticism PART III: ETHICS, THE NOVEL, AND THE PRIVATE-PUBLIC DISTINCTION 9. Resuscitating Ethical Criticism: Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Significance of the Novel 10. John Dewey and the Moral Imagination 11. ´Redemption from Egotism´: Richard Rorty, the Private-Public Distinction, and the Novel 12. ´Soucie-toi de toi-même´: Michel Foucault and Etho-Poetics PART IV: PRAGMATISM, RACE AND COSMOPOLITANISM 13. ´The myth-men are going´: Richard Wright, Communism, and Cosmopolitan Humanism 14. ´Where the people can sing, the poet can live´: James Baldwin, Pragmatism, and Cosmopolitan Humanism PART V: CONCLUSION Notes Bibliography

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Ulf Schulenberg is a Visiting Professor of American Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. He is the author of Zwischen Realismus und Avantgarde: Drei Paradigmen für die Aporien des Entweder-Oder (2000) and Lovers and Knowers: Moments of the American Cultural Left (2007), as well as the co-editor of Americanization-Globalization-Education (2003). He has published widely in the fields of literary and cultural theory, American studies, and American and European intellectual history.

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