Abstract

As a way towards recovering a pragmatist aesthetics, and before viewing a literary work in its terms, this dissertation relationally gathers together the individual views, with respect to imagination, of a line of American pragmatists that begins with William James. A synoptic re-examination of his work, chapter one explores both how he uses imagination and what he says about it. For James there not one Imagination, but many perspectively and processionally dependent imaginations deeply grounded in ordinary life. ;The connection between imagination and daily life is even more evident in the post-1917 work of John Dewey. In his belief that acts of imagination are ingredient to "all conscious experience," Dewey's pragmatist aesthetics becomes a democratic aesthetics. As I demonstrate in chapter three, the social role he thereby creates for an aesthetics based on imagination and everyday experience is subsequently renewed through the culturally oriented aesthetics of the new pragmatists Clifford Geertz, Richard Rorty, Jerome Bruner, and Richard Poirier. By looking at how these four figures, from four different disciplines, appropriate WJ's and Dewey's legacy of imagination in order to revitalize a pragmatist legacy in critical thinking, I show that they have in effect resituated aesthetics and the symbol producing faculty nearer the center of pragmatist studies. ;To conclude my study, I turn to what I see Henry James's literary version of a pragmatist aesthetics, namely his late masterpiece, The Golden Bowl. The characters of this novel act on their mental images in such a way that these become the currency through which they experience life. It is an aesthetic situation which I hope to have interestingly encompassed, to play on Kenneth Burke's rhetoric, with the pragmatist attitudes and strategies presented in the earlier chapters