By Michael Magee
Emancipating Pragmatism is a thorough rereading of Emerson that posits African- American tradition, literature, and jazz because the very continuation and embodiment of pragmatic concept and democratic culture. It lines Emerson's philosophical legacy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to find how Emersonian suggestion keeps to notify problems with race, aesthetics, and poetic discourse.
Emerson's pragmatism derives from his abolitionism, Michael Magee argues, and any pragmatic concept that aspires towards democracy can't forget about and needs to reckon with its racial roots. Magee appears to be like on the ties among pragmatism and African-American tradition as they happen themselves in key texts and activities, similar to William Carlos Williams's poetry; Ralph Ellison's discourse in Invisible guy and Juneteenth and his essays on jazz; the poetic works of Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, and Frank O'Hara; in addition to the "new jazz" being solid at golf equipment just like the 5 Spot in ny.
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Additional info for Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing
Sample text
I wish I might write a play in collaboration with him” (211). The possibilities and the limitations, the abilities and incapacities of Williams are all here. A collaborative play based on improvisations in slang. Collaborative improvisation. Does Williams even know that he is signifying on jazz here? And suggesting a writing practice that would be, in Ellison’s sense, “jazz-shaped”? Vaguely, I suspect. Regardless, the mood here is subjunctive: Williams wishes that he might, but the implication is that he certainly won’t.
Williams’s belief that black people should hate European music says much about his confusion regarding jazz. Cecil Taylor re®ects a widespread approach among jazz musicians when he says, “I am not afraid of European in®uences. 62 Ellison analogized the jazz musician’s approach to his own use of other writers: “Anywhere I ¤nd a critic who has an idea or concept that seems useful, I grab it. Eclecticism is the 42 democratic symbolic action word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him” (CE 364).
There, he called “free verse” a “deliberate action . . 47 Dewey was suggesting that “experimental” poetry (free verse being one such “experiment”) was a type of democratic symbolic action, designed to see whether the world would stand for and promote, or conversely frustrate, democracy, whether the linguistic structures of the poem would be consonant with or dissonant to the social structures against which the poem acted. Williams was primed to accept these connections among philosophy, democracy, and poetic form.
