The Pragmatist Turn: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature by Giles Gunn (review)

Reviewed by: The Pragmatist Turn: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature by Giles Gunn Sarah Rivett (bio) The Pragmatist Turn: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American Literature Giles Gunn University of Virginia Press, 2017. xiv + 198 pp. $65 cloth, $29.50 paperback. My first engagement with the field of early American literature was Giles Gunn's anthology, Early American Writing (1994). Gunn's anthology responded to a "seismic" shift in American literary history by proposing a new canon: alongside William Bradford and John Winthrop, we read Cherokee, Inuit, and Hopi creation myths. The "literature of settlement and colonization" is preceded by a host of Spanish and European voices and succeeded by writers of the Black Atlantic, Olaudah Equiano and Phyllis Wheatley. In place of Puritan origins, Gunn proposed a multivocal past that eroded the trajectory of colony to nation as an outcome preordained in 1620. Appearing more than two decades later, The Pragmatist Turn (2017) reads as a capstone of Gunn's scholarship during the intervening time. His essay collection, Ideas to Live For (2015), is helpful to read alongside The Pragmatist Turn because of its succinct treatment of pragmatism. For Gunn, pragmatism is a theory of representation as much as it is a theory of knowledge. Pragmatism "attempts to reconcile" Enlightenment epistemology with the American "religious imagination" (Ideas to Live For, 117). With a sweeping historical breadth and ambitious intellectual history, The Pragmatist Turn offers an occasion to reflect on three of the most significant changes in American literary studies over the past twenty-five years: the aforementioned canon debates; the religious turn; and the geographic shift from New England to Atlantic, hemispheric, and global perspectives. The religious turn followed on the heels of the canon debates of the 1990s. By the early 2000s literary historians realized the inadequacy of the secularization thesis. A noted scholar of religious history, Gunn encouraged us to rethink what religion is, how it endures, and how it exists in tension with and alongside the American Enlightenment. One of the major contributions of The Pragmatist Turn is an explanation of the coexistence of "Protestantism" and "American Enlightenment" as two distinct modes of consciousness, or "spiritual imaginaries" that configure the field of American literary history and its power relations (1-5). Once grand narratives such as Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism became less central to the Enlightenment and modernity, the centrality of New England as a prevailing national ideology and of Puritanism as philosophical structure also receded. Gunn has been a prominent voice in a group of twenty-first century scholars who argue that American [End Page 161] writing, like US history more broadly, can best be understood from a global perspective. Each of these field-changing paradigms are at play in The Pragmatist Turn. It is a book deeply conscious of the methodological dilemma that the 1990s opened up: while multivocality, post-secularity, and globalism rightly critiqued false historiographical premises of American origins, these frameworks eroded the alluring coherence first generated by Perry Miller. Origins stories are convenient and seductive ways of narrating the past. Gunn points out that Miller's success depended on his ability to forge intellectual and cultural links between the Puritans and the present day (21). The charge of post-exceptionalist Americanists is the opposite. We dismantle these links, decenter New England, and air our suspicions about historical teleology. Aware of the gaps left by dismantled origins, The Pragmatist Turn is determined to absorb the methodological lessons of the past three decades and to write American literary history anew. This is a tall order given the nearly impossible task of achieving a coherent story about American literature that spans centuries, while not also replicating the teleological structure baked into the field's founding historiography. In place of telos, Gunn proposes a "non-linear" flow of ideas rather than a causal sequence of historical events (4). But this non-linear flow gets lost behind chapters that move from "Puritan Ascendance and Decline" to "Religion and the Enlightenment under the Sign of the Modern and Beyond." Gunn also replaces "origins" with "beginnings." If we consider America "an imaginary idea" that precedes European...

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