Forming the world: Pragmatism and Aesthetics

This course will explore key pragmatist philosophical and theoretical approaches to literature, the visual arts, and music. How are human lives mediated by and through aesthetic experience, in the realm of the private as well as the public. Rather than positing a metaphysical idea of beauty, the thinkers and artists we engage ask how texts and artworks render us sensitive to our multifaceted contingencies, and how we may speak and write about them. Readings and viewings include R. W. Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Martin Heidegger, John Dewey, T. W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Richard Rorty, Terrence Malick, J. M. Coetzee, Bruno Latour, Marilynne Robinson, Nancy Fraser, Rita Felski, Tania Bruguera, Yivve Citton, Richard Moose, Cheryl Misak, and Shannon Sullivan, among others.