Understanding James, Understanding Modernism

Psychologist, philosopher, teacher, writer—William James stood closer than any other thinker to the center of the confluence of intellectual and artistic forces that defined the culture of modernism. The outstanding feature of this volume lies in its intent to investigate James’s influence on both American and International Modernism. It provides, on the one hand, a multifaceted introduction to students of history, philosophy, and culture, and on the other, a compendium of some of the most up-to-date thinking on this central figure.James’s first book, Principles of Psychology (1890) immediately established James as the leading psychologist of his time, at a moment in history when psychology seemed to offer the promise of finding some definitive answers to eternal philosophical conundra. James’s innovations would register a clear effect on much modernist art, most evidently in the stylistic prose experiments of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and their imitators. James’s tentative skepticism concerning the concept of consciousness as such, and the post-Cartesian ego that was its foundation, also anticipates the questioning of the subject that would be the theme of much modern, and indeed postmodern thought. The contributors to this volume explore James’s most essential texts as well as his influence on contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers. The final section is a glossary of James’s key terms, with entries written by leading experts.

Understanding James, Understanding Modernism collects into a single volume an impressive set of essays by both well-established and emerging experts guiding us through James's entire philosophy, viewed through the prism of literary and cultural modernism. Many of James's well-known ideas—including pragmatism, pluralism, philosophical temperaments, radical empiricism, stream of thought, and the will to believe—are illuminated in strikingly novel ways in this context. It turns out that modernism, emphasizing temporality, change, and the 'flux' of reality in contrast to fixity, abstraction, and unchanging essences, captures much of what is central to James's basic pragmatist, pluralist, and empiricist approach. The book offers an astonishing breadth and coverage, a plurality of perspectives on his thought that James himself would have admired., With impressive scholarship, these lucid and probing essays trace William James's protean work from book to book and remind us of what an original modern thinker he was. They offer a fresh and convincing account of his intersections with boldly innovative modern writers, beginning with his own brother Henry., This volume is an insightful and accessible entry into William James’s thought, creating new perspectives inside a mapping of the essential ideas. It shows precisely how James translated experience into modernity, negotiating between the claims of science and opening pluralistic worlds in thought and practice. The strength of the collection is the way it addresses the entire range of James’s works and offers a wealth of multiple relations between James, modernism and literature., Evans (English, Dalhousie Univ., Canada) has assembled an impressive collection of original essays examining the varied contributions of philosopher, psychologist, and religious thinker William James (1842–1910) to the project of modernism. James's reflections on the nature of consciousness, religious experience, time, and meaning profoundly affected a range of artists, writers, and social and philosophical theorists—including his brother Henry James, W. E. B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, and Henri Bergson. Essays on Marcel Proust, Frost, Stein, and Wallace Stevens demonstrate how significantly James's thought shaped and unshaped modernist culture. Emphasis is on James's relation to modernist endeavors in the US, the UK, France, and Italy. Students of the history of ideas will particularly value part 3, "A Glossary," which includes essays on 14 terms and concepts key to James's thinking, including habit, morality, pluralism, pragmatism, pure experience, and stream of thought. This volume offers an accessible map of James's relation to modernist aesthetics and intellectual projects and thus provides a rich base for further inquiries into modernism, aesthetics, philosophy, and religion. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty., If the other volumes [in the series] are anywhere near as good as this one, they are a bargain … Reading through the volume with its very high and consistent standards of cogency and clarity made me see the work as a really important—and lively—re-assessment of modernism itself, and a book I can no longer do without. Understanding James, Understanding Modernism is a robust defense of pragmatism, pluralism, and religious experience, and the entire volume is merrily complicit in what Evans calls ‘the defenestration of metaphysics that would become the central philosophical project of the twentieth century.’

David H. Evans is Associate Professor of English at Dalhousie University, Canada. He is the author of William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition (2008) and co-editor of America and Violence, a special issue of the Canadian Review of American Studies (2008).