My scholarship focuses on literary pragmatism. Both a commentary on U.S. cultural identity and a cosmopolitan movement, pragmatism is often considered the defining American contribution to Western thought. In my research, I consider how American authors incorporate, complicate, and revise interdisciplinary pragmatist constructions of democracy, individuality, material society, and the relationship between experience and truth. The strength of this approach rests on the way it provides an elastic framework that elucidates the writings of a diverse range of authors, from Benjamin Franklin to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Henry James, from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright to David Foster Wallace.

FIRST BOOK: Cultivated during a postwar era of industrial change and economic growth, pragmatism emerged in the late nineteenth century as the new shape of American intellectual identity. My forthcoming book, Henry James and the Philosophy of Literary Pragmatism, argues that Henry James’s fiction provides the fullest expression of how early pragmatism understands the relationship between experience and truth. To this end, the book examines the interdisciplinary foundations of pragmatism from a literary perspective, tracing the characters and settings that populate the narratives of pragmatist thought. Charles Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. were close friends who founded different branches of pragmatism while writing on a vast array of topics. Sceptical about philosophy, William’s brother Henry stood at the margins of this group, crafting his own version of pragmatism through his novels and short stories. My book argues that James’s fiction weaves together the varied depictions of individuality, society, experience, and truth found in the works of Peirce, Holmes, and William James. By doing so, James brings to diverse narrative life a defining moment in American intellectual and material history.

SECOND BOOK: My second book examines pragmatism in the context of interwar African-American literature. During the 1920s and 30s, philosophers like John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Jane Addams began to deploy pragmatist thought to build individualistic and creative models of democracy, exposing, in the process, some of the contradictions and inequalities in the mass democratic state. These thinkers recast pragmatism as a philosophical and sociopolitical movement that could appeal specifically to marginalized people in America, including African Americans and women. My book shows how Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jessie Fauset play out the dynamics of creative democracy through African-American female characters. These characters revolve among diverse communities, seeking artistic and intellectual autonomy, communication across social divisions, and working examples of equality. In this way, they try to create, for themselves, organic and experiential versions of democracy free of the mechanistic rhythms of the “Great Society.”

ONGOING RESEARCH: My third project explores contemporary American literary portrayals of issues that are often associated with masculinity, including gun violence, injuries in high-contact sports, and the oil industry. I examine the way mainstream narratives of American identity demarcate these concerns. One of the purposes of this project is to analyze how such narratives feed into diffuse yet pervasive strategies aimed at alleviating the sense of threat contained in school shootings, sports injuries, and economic dependency on petroleum. Another related purpose is to critique the cultural personae that stand at the core of these narratives, including the school shooter, the professional athlete, and the oil tycoon. For example, in an article published recently in Studies in the Novel, I argue that the protagonists in Stephen King’s Rage and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin try to situate the figure of the school shooter within a social hierarchy structured around hypermasculine ideals. In another article that appeared recently in Literature/Film Quarterly, I argue that P. T. Anderson’s 2007 film There Will Be Blood (based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!) dramatizes the process of adaptation, transforming the oil tycoon from a conscientious albeit single-minded entrepreneur into the embodiment of capitalist competition and destruction. In addition to these articles, I also have published an article and a book chapter on the depiction of the sports industry in the works of contemporary American authors. For example, in an article that appeared in Aethlon: Journal of Sport Literature, I consider the way Robert Penn Warren, Richard Ford, and Richard Russo represent the role football injuries play in exposing tensions between ideals of sacrifice and individualism in American sports.