Richard Rorty’s Notion of a Poeticized Culture

Romanticism and Pragmatism is not a book on Romanticism, but on pragmatism’s use of Romanticism. I shall not discuss the various twentieth-century attempts to grasp conceptually the multilayered complexity of Romantic literature, from René Wellek, Arthur Lovejoy, and Meyer Abrams to Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and Jerome McGann’s New Historicist reading of this period. Some of these authors will play a certain role in my argument. However, I shall concentrate on pragmatism’s attempt to make Romanticism part of a modern antifoundationalist tradition. “Romanticism” is undoubtedly one of the most protean terms in literary history, and this is true concerning both English and American Romanticism. What does Romanticism stand for? From today’s perspective, the difficulty, if not impossibility, of answering this question has become obvious. Potential answers include the creative imagination; a revolution of spirit; excessive selfhood and the desire for self-creation; transformative will; an emphasis on interiority; the plurality and incompatibility of values; sublimity; the attack on tradition; the supernatural; the idea that poetry might replace the dogmas of religion and philosophy (or the assimilation of religious ideas within the framework of a worldview founded on secular premises); the dialectics of transcendence and worldliness; political radicalism and conservatism; the idea that the radically new work of art and the passion for invented forms are directed against stasis, traditional categories and divisions, and the predictability of aesthetic, political, and moral principles; antidualism (as anti-Platonism); and a process of perpetual forward creation, transformation, and future orientation. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.