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Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents seeks to address the kinds of challenges that cosmopolitan perspectives and practices face in a world organized increasingly in relation to a proliferating series of global absolutisms - religious, political, social, and economic. While these challenges are often used to support the claim that cosmopolitanism is impotent to resist such totalizing ideologies because it is either a Western conceit or a globalist fiction, Gunn argues that cosmopolitanism is neither. Situating his discussion in an emphatically global context, Gunn shows how cosmopolita

The aim of this book is to challenge the assumptions made by the structuralist and post-structuralist schools of literary criticism. It defends and attempts to re-evaluate the kind of moral reflection associated with the critical legacy of such writers as Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson

The papers consist of five letters (1848-1854) written by Giles Gunn, a native of Connecticut, while he was a schoolteacher in Lexington, Rockbridge County, Virginia. The letters, addressed primarily to his sister Mary (living at the Gunn home in Washington, Litchfield County, Connecticut), include discussions of interesting local events as well as references to family. Topics include commencement at the Virginia Military Institute; a detailed description of his school and his methods of instruction; a description of the communion service at a local church, including references to black communicants; references to the townspeople's reaction to a rumored slave insurrection; and a discussion of the murder of VMI Cadet Thomas Blackburn.

"Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents seeks to address the kinds of challenges that cosmopolitan perspectives and practices face in a world organized increasingly in relation to a proliferating series of global absolutisms--religious, political, social, and economic. While these challenges are often used to support the claim that cosmopolitanism is impotent to resist such totalizing ideologies because it is either a Western conceit or a globalist fiction, Gunn argues that cosmopolitanism is neither. Situating his discussion in an emphatically global context, Gunn shows how cosmopolitanism has been effective in resisting such essentialisms and authoritarianisms precisely because it is more pragmatic than prescriptive, more self-critical than self-interested and finds several of its foremost recent expressions in the work of an Indian philosopher, a Palestinian writer, and South African story-tellers. This kind of cosmopolitanism offers a genuine ethical alternative to the politics of dogmatism and extremism because it is grounded on a new delineation of the human and opens toward a new, indeed, an "other," humanism"--

The attempt by the George W. Bush administration to reshape world order, especially but not exclusively after September 11, 2001, increasingly appears to have resulted in a catastrophic "misshaping" of geopolitics in the wake of bungled campaigns in the Middle East and their many reverberations worldwide. Journalists and scholars are now trying to understand what happened, and this volume explores the role of culture and rhetoric in this process of geopolitical transformation. What difference do cultural concepts and values make to the cognitive and emotional weather of which, at various levels, international politics is both consequence and perceived corrective? The distinguished scholars in this multidisciplinary volume bring the tools of cultural analysis to the profound ongoing debate about how geopolitics is mapped and what determines its governance. The volume includes essays by Eileen Boris, Richard Falk, Giles Gunn, Mark Juergensmeyer, Lisa Lowe, Simon Ortiz, David Palumbo-Liu, Lisa Parks, Donald Pease, Wade Clark Roof, John Carlos Rowe, Gabriele Schwab, and Ronald Steel.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Pragmatism Then and Now -- WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES PRAGMATISM MAKE? THE VIEW FROM PHILOSOPHY -- Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism -- Response to Hilary Putnam's "Pragmatism and Realism" -- The Moral Impulse -- What's the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist? -- PRAGMATISM AND THE REMAKING OF SOCIAL THOUGHT -- Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking? -- Pragmatism and Democracy: Reconstructing the Logic of John Dewey's Faith -- Community in the Pragmatic Tradition -- Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical "Race" Theory, and the Politics of Culture -- Going Astray, Going Forward: Du Boisian Pragmatism and Its Lineage -- The Inspiration of Pragmatism: Some Personal Remarks -- The Missing Pragmatic Revival in American Social Science -- Pragmatism and Its Limits -- PRAGMATISM AND LAW -- Pragmatic Adjudication -- Freestanding Legal Pragmatism -- What's Pragmatic about Legal Pragmatism? -- Pragmatism and Law: A Response to David Luban -- It's a Positivist, It's a Pragmatist, It's a Codifier! Reflections on Nietzsche and Stendhal -- Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Legal Interpretation: Posner's and Rorty's Justice without Metaphysics Meets Hate Speech -- PRAGMATISM, CULTURE, AND ART -- Why Do Pragmatists Want to Be Like Poets? -- Pragmatists and Poets: A Response to Richard Poirier -- The Novelist of Everyday Life, -- When Mind Is a Verb: Thomas Eakins and the Work of Doing -- Religion and the Recent Revival of Pragmatism -- Afterword Truth and Toilets: Pragmatism and the Practices of Life -- Selected Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index