A Community of Inquiry: Conversations between Classical American Philosophy and American Literature (review)

Interdisciplinary scholarship is rarely easy, in part because it exposes the practitioner, fairly or not, to the charge of not knowing enough about one discipline or another. No such criticism arises in relation to Patrick Dooley's philosophical and critical exploration of the ties between pragmatist philosophy and fiction written in the realist and naturalist tradition. A Community of Inquiry offers a series of elegant close readings of texts, chiefly from the 1870s through the 1920s, that illuminate the ways in which these movements were deeply tied to each other. Starting with Charles Sanders Peirce and including such thinkers as John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and especially William James, Dooley shows that pragmatist philosophy's various articulations of ethics, individualism, religion, and community were part of a broader "cultural endowment of concepts and problems" (2). The word conversation in the book's title suggests three distinct modes. First, he refers to the ways in which specific authors and texts variously contributed to and articulated that "cultural endowment," often in direct response to each other. Thus we see, for instance, William James and Theodore Roosevelt responding to each other's ideas about "the strenuous life" over several decades, while William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Frank Norris also contribute to cultural conversations about individualism, character, ethics, and spiritualism. Second, Dooley is equally concerned with how specific philosophical ideas become the stuff of literary treatment in the work of subsequent generations. Hence, he offers compelling readings of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) in relation to James's ideas about spirituality and of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Norman Maclean's tales in light of Josiah Royce's community-minded pragmatism.

Third, Dooley's various essays reveal an abiding interest in rejuvenating the conversation between the disciplines of philosophy and literary criticism. Of the eighteen chapters in this book, only two (not counting the introduction) have not previously appeared elsewhere. The downside to this may be that scholars familiar with Dooley's work will find little they have not already read. The benefit to their being collected in one volume, however, is that the complex and interrelated parts of that "cultural endowment" become immediately apparent, all the more so for being accessible in a format that rewards consecutive reading and more selective browsing. Dooley, in fact, explicitly recommends the latter mode, suggesting that "readers may want to pick and choose chapters based on their interests in specific authors, literary topics, or philosophical questions" (xix). There is, of course, a pedagogical dimension to all of this, an ambition focused not on prompting philosophers to read realist fiction but rather on inspiring readers of the fiction to pick up and understand some of the philosophy along the way. Indeed, an appendix lists further readings and critical editions in pragmatist philosophy but does not offer the same guidance in realism and naturalism. This is not to fault the book; rather, it shows that Dooley has very carefully chosen his audience and has, as a philosopher, engagingly invited his fellow literary critics to consider the responses and contributions to pragmatist philosophy made by some of America's best writers of realist fiction. That a great many of his readings and examples involve writing from or about the American West, moreover, may very well turn the conversation he has in mind to matters of the West's role as a constitutive element of the pragmatist legacy.