Lovers and Knowers: Moments of the American Cultural Left

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ulf Schulenberg
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2007 to 2008
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 36063363

Lovers and Knowers discusses the development of the American cultural Left in the twentieth century. Seeking to contribute to the discussion of the relation between American Studies and the field of theory, the book focuses on the analysis of a specific theoretical problem. It attempts to elucidate the multilayered complexity of the relation between antifoundationalists and foundationalists, antitheorists and theorists, and (liberal) ironists and metaphysicians. Proposing the idea of an antifoundationalist and antiessentialist worldly and oppositional criticism, the study argues that it is possible to develop an antifoundationalist and antiessentialist thinking whose notion of the political and whose understanding of the function of literary and cultural criticism clearly differ from those suggested by neopragmatists such as Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. It is shown that Cornel West's version of neopragmatism ought to be understood as a radical leftist cultural and political position within an antifoundationalist theoretical framework, that is, he illustrates that it is possible to develop an oppositional and worldly criticism (in the Saidian sense) by dialectically using the insights of (neo)pragmatist antifoundationalism.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants