The Pragmatist Turn: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature by Giles Gunn (review)

Giles Gunn describes his most recent book, The Pragmatist Turn—and I am paraphrasing here—as a nonlinear history. His first explicitly stated goal is to trace the history of "two different traditions of faith and practice" in American thought, namely seventeenth-century American religion (mainly of the Protestant strand) and eighteenth-century American Enlightenment thinking. More specifically, he is interested in understanding the way that these two strands have managed to influence nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writing. Rather than surviving intact, as distinct strains of thought, they have undergone what Gunn calls "a kind of pragmatic refashioning." According to Gunn, this refashioning has allowed these traditions to survive neither in a genealogical line of descent and inheritance nor through some sort of "recombination" into "new species." Rather, these traditions have instead "survived as modes of consciousness, as styles of sense and sensibility, or as what we would now call spiritual imaginaries" (1). While Gunn is interested in the fact that these two "imaginaries" survived and continued to exert influence on American writing through the twentieth century, his real aim in this study is to explain how these two strands have continued to exert the influence they have exerted. As he puts it, his book is "an inquiry into how two different, but not wholly discrete or unrelated, spiritual imaginaries were able to remain consequential in the development of later American writing." His answer is that they were able to do so largely through a "pragmatist refashioning" that allowed them to offer subsequent generations some vantage point from which they could gain insight into what he calls "the spiritual imaginary of America," the larger—and at times impenetrable—whole of which these two traditions form a part (4).

In the first chapter of his book, which he titles "The Difficulty of Beginnings," Gunn identifies not a singular difficulty but four distinct difficulties that present themselves as obstacles to his study. First there is the problem of overgeneralizing. Even if he ignores other religious faiths (e.g. Roman Catholicism and Judaism, both of which had established presences in the colonies by the late eighteenth century) and focuses exclusively on "Protestantism," he must confront the fact that American colonial Protestantism was hardly monolithic. Similarly, Enlightenment thinking in colonial America was, as he sees it, "composed of at least four discriminable traditions" (15). Second, Gunn observes that "the presence of the Enlightenment … has grown more and more invisible" in our understanding of our own intellectual and cultural history (17). Third, Gunn identifies as problematic the "primacy we have given to the geographical region known as New England." It should be noted that in his discussion of these last two reasons, Gunn offers a very smart and fresh critique of the work of Perry Miller who played a significant role in what he calls the "erasure of the enlightenment" as well as the scholarly indifference to other geographical regions (20). As significant as these three difficulties may be, the challenge they pose to Gunn is much less consequential than the fourth and final difficulty: "deciding where American writing itself begins" (24). This final difficulty is of course an artifact of the past half century of scholarly inquiry (across several disciplines) that has radically altered the way we talk about both the European colonization of North and South America and the histories and cultures of the peoples who populated those landmasses prior to the arrival of Europeans. While Gunn offers a concise and astute analysis of the difficulty that confronts him in his project, he does not (in this chapter at least) offer readers a resolution to that difficulty.

In the next two chapters of his book, titled "Puritan Ascendance and Decline" and "Enlightenment and a New Age Dawning" respectively, Gunn provides the necessary setting of the stage for his larger argument. If neither of these chapters offers groundbreaking insights, they do provide elegant and concise minihistories of the...