Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism by Giles Gunn (review)

BookReviews 239 eral), the English style of William Macready or the more bombastic style common toAmerican actors such as Edwin Forrest. Porte notes the political resonance of this dispute, along with evidence pointing to Melville's ambivalence with both styles. Here the tension of cultural indecision perse comes to define the "American" project . In my opinion, this essay justifies the value of Porte's would-be "community project" in Respect to Egotism. Louis A. Renza Dartmouth College •••••• Giles Gunn. Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992.Pp. xiii + 273. "One can be interesting only in a world where diversity is not merely a distraction, in which difference is not regarded as a deformity. All of the chapters in this book are designed in one way or another to substantiate this point." Thus writes Giles Gunn, near the beginning of Thinking Across the American Grain, a bracing run, in the "cultural studies" inter- and metadisciplinary mode, across awide swath of American intellectual and cultural history. Gunn locates his "interesting" approach to "diversity" in American pragmatism, and chapters 2 through 5 consist mostly of critical discussions of Henry James Sr (and his three extraordinary children), John Dewey, and Richard Rorty, with sthnulating reference along the way to the likes of other alleged pragmatists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Richard Poirier and wide-ranging cultural critics like Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling. Gunn also finds the pragmatic impulse in a host of canonized authors from Anne Bradstreet to Tony Morrison. In the pivotal chapter 6, Gunn links up pragmatism with the open-ended mind-set handed down from the American "Enlightenment," regrettably overshadowed, at least on its more moderate and rational sides, in our time by a complex of events, including those put forth by Perry Miller, the perceived rise of the romance as the dominant American fictive, and the hostility of feminists who see the Enlightenment and its legacy as patriarchal . Gunn then takes his reader on a magisterial tour of literary theory, the new historicism, interdisciplinarity, and what he calls"academic pluralism." Deftly spearingand bringing to view the endless moral and aesthetic aporiae,such as the debate over "the canon," besetting current approaches to culture, Gunn suggests pragmatic and "Enlightened" solutions. In the end, neopragmatism, with itsgenerous, Ishmael- 240 CanadianReviewof American Studies like willingnessto look at the world through the eyes of others, comes to the rescue of, first, Ahabian over-detennined "ideology'' arising out of the current controversies regarding race, class, and gender, and, second, "intellect," the simultaneous methodological disputes concerning literary theory, interdisciplinarity, the new historicism , and the like. I finished this book with mixed reactions. On the one hand, I could only respect its subtlety and erudition. I would certainly recommend it for anyone wishing to be aufait in a serious way with the central issues around some very significant pieces of intellectual turf currently in dispute; indeed, that is probably the main value of the book for most readers. It is impossible not to admire Gunn's decent and sophisticated attempt to find his way back, however tentatively, toward a reasoned, moral centre and reestablishment of the "Self' amidst our current postmodernist chaos of discourses at once totalizing and decentring. Gunn does not take the easy way out by nostalgic reactionary flight, ala Allan Bloom, to an Amoldian high culture now menaced by "Theory." Instead, he sees pragmatism as a means of reconciling opposed camps, especially the two principal players, poststructuralism and the new historicism. Poststructuralism and pragmatism , especially in its Rortyan form, as well as the new historicism, share a sense of the constructedness and arbitrariness of culture. Instead, therefore, of the usual jeremiads on the hermeticization of academic and cultural life into narrowly specialized constructed discourses, Gunn sees in this same much-lamented tendency opportunities for larger, richer discourse, if only everyone will just start listening to each other's constructions in mutual recognition that are just that-constructions. They are also, however, enmeshed in social.cultural, and historical relationships. The emphasis on these networks comprises the "radical empiricism," which is the common concern of pragmatism and the new historicism, with its "thick...