Department of English; open to students in other departments.

Open to Doctoral, M. A., and Master of Arts in Humanities students.

``Art breaks through the barriers that divide human beings, which are impermeable in ordinary association. This force of art, common to all the arts, is most fully manifested in literature.''

--John Dewey, Art As Experience

Born before the Civil War (a war he experienced in his toddler years), and living until 1952, John Dewey wrote for some 70 years. His greatest value for living with literature lies in his theories of experience and of aesthetic experience. The two are closely linked but not equivalent. To the extent that any one book can represent him, Dewey's mature thought is most fully expressed in Art As Experience, first published in 1934. It will be one of the main texts of this course.

From his early article on the Theory of Emotion in 1895, and on to his very last writings (such as his forward to the poetry of Claude McKay) Dewey is thoroughly experiential--and that means, among other things, that he deals with feelings and emotion as integral to having, not merely knowing about, experience. Very few current theories can do this, or are even interested in doing such a thing. At the same time, he remains socially attuned: he is on the alert for possibilities of social change in the direction of a democratic way of life, as distinguished from our present merely formal democracy consisting of periodic elections. For Dewey, literature and the arts have a lot to do with democracy's chances of ever becoming a reality.

Experience is perhaps the one major essential concept that has been left out of current approaches to literature. Or, if it is not left out, it is assumed to be impossible to have in an age of media-dominance and the triumph of mechanical production, or it is reduced to offshoots of ideologically-driven theorizing, or approached as if it were affectless, or fearfully excluded because it might not fit with ideological preconceptions. Literature or literary theory without experience are useless. The loss is huge; yet with Dewey it begins to be recoverable.

The course will not deal solely with Dewey's aesthetics. We will be learning as well about the current resurgence of interest in Dewey in several key areas. Nell Noddings' work toward an ``ethic of care,'' for example; Dewey and feminism; and Richard Rorty's neo-Pragmatist version of Dewey.

In this kind of course, with its commitment to experience, we won't be spending 15 weeks on theory without literature. We will apply our Deweyan approaches as we learn them to reading and re-reading (undergoing and doing, as Dewey has it) two major works of literature: Hamlet the most canonical of classics; and D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, a novel that puts special demands on the emotional as well as intellectual capacity of its readers. Can it still be experienced? Was it ever? And, had it been written by a woman, would it today be known as one of the great feminist classics?

Recent books have shown the relevance of Dewey's pragmatist thinking for our own era. Two of these will be texts for the course: Thomas M. Alexander's John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (1987), and Robert B. Westbrook's John Dewey and American Democracy (Cornell, 1991).

Alexander's book shows how Art as Experience can be interpreted in the context of Dewey's whole life-work and how it can be understood in relation to the thought of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Locke, William James, Wittgenstein, and Rorty. It offers ways into literature, with its experience-based readings of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River."

Westbrook studies Dewey's entire life work of writing and political action. He places Dewey's writings within the social-political contexts of his public life, while at the same time offering descriptive accounts of each work. You learn why Dewey declined to received a medal from the Emperor in his visit to Japan; you learn the details of Dewey's presiding over the "trial" of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1937, and of the resultant fallout over Marxism versus Pragmatism. People with no previous knowledge of Dewey will be able to dive into his thought with the help of this volume.

Many other recent works in Deweyan theory and allied fields may be consulted. I certainly will not be bringing in all of the following, but I list them here as a way of indicating how much has been going on. For examples: Feminism and Pragmatism (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), by Charlene Haddock Siegfreid; Richard Shusterman's Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Blackwell, 1992);and his Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (Routledge, 1997)--which is actually about connecting your "theory" (whatever it might be) with the way you live. Also: Brian Caraher, Wordsworth's "Slumber" and the Problematics of Reading; Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism; Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; Louise M. Rosenblatt's books, Literature as Experience and The Reader,the Text, the Poem; Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism; Stephen M. Fishman, "Dewey and Composition Studies"; Michael Eldridge, Transforming Experience: John Dewey's Cultural Instrumentalism (1998); Larry Hickman, ed., Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation (1998).

And: John J. Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism: Philosophy, Experience and Community (1997); Kathleen M. Wheeler, Romanticism, Pragmatism, and Deconstruction; Steven C. Rockefeller,John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (Columbia Univ. Press, 1991); Giles Gunn, Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect and the New Pragmatism, and of course Cornell West, The American Evasion of Philosophy; The Genealogy of Pragmatism. Of special interest is the 1999 volume by Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism.

We would also consider relations with some of the newer theories in American psychoanalysis, especially Thomas H. Ogden, The Primitive Edge of Experience, and take up affinities with Continental philosophy, especially Habermas's use and revision of Dewey, and the later work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense.

And: my own article, "Literature as Experience: Dewey's Aesthetics in an Age of Galloping Theory," published in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Spring, 1995.

I will require a "Reading Log," to be handed in every two weeks, concerning your responses to the things we read and discuss. The Log can be as detailed and as far-ranging as you wish. Each member will have a chance to lead the seminar in discussion.

A term paper (15-30 pages) will be required, and I will ask you to follow it up with any revisions that I think might improve it. The paper can be on any topic reasonably related to the course.

Seminar members will be encouraged to sign on to the Dewey Listserv and take part in its many and varied exchanges.

For further information, call me at, 716-836-7332.