Gander, Catherine
(2018)
Poetry as embodied experience: the pragmatist
aesthetics of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry.
Textual Practice, 32 (7).
pp. 1205-1229.
ISSN 0950-236X
Abstract
This essay reads Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry (1949) as a vital account of
pragmatist aesthetics in the vein of John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934). It
argues that Rukeyser’s treatise is an exercise in embodied cultural experience
that draws upon the key pragmatic aesthetic tenets of pluralism and
naturalism – i.e. the understanding that knowledge is derived from a living
organism’s mind–body interaction with its environment. Further, it explores
Rukeyser’s understanding that ‘aesthetics’, as contemporary philosopher Mark
Johnson has argued, must move beyond the compartmentalised study of art
and its a/effects to ‘become the basis of any profound understanding of
meaning and thought … to explore how meaning is possible for creatures
with our types of bodies, environments, and cultural institutions and
practices’. Highlighting recent studies in neuroscience, cognitive linguistics,
and philosophy of embodied mind that are grounded in pragmatism, this
essay demonstrates Rukeyser’s foresight in constructing a cross-disciplinary,
multivalent aesthetics of human meaning-making that anticipated such
advances by decades. The Life of Poetry suggests a practical philosophy of the
art of living that breaks down the traditional binaries of mind/body, science/
art, self/other by positioning poetry pluralistically to encompass the social and
personal potentialities of embodied human experience.
Repository Staff Only(login required)
 |
Item control page |
Downloads per month over past year
Origin of downloads
Altmetric
Altmetric