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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Supreme Fiction: Fiction Or Fact?, Gregory Brazeal
The Supreme Fiction: Fiction Or Fact?, Gregory Brazeal
Gregory Brazeal
The article makes a case for giving up the quest to identify Wallace Stevens’ “supreme fiction.” The poet hoped to usher in the creation of an idea that would serve as a fictive replacement for the idea of God, known to be fictive but willfully believed. His hope has remained unfulfilled. By the poet’s own explicit standards, the supreme fiction does not appear in any of his poems, nor in his poetry as a whole, nor in poetry in general. The very idea of a supreme fiction may depend, at least in part, upon a problematic conception of belief drawn …
Wallace Stevens' Philosophical Evasions, Gregory Brazeal
Wallace Stevens' Philosophical Evasions, Gregory Brazeal
Gregory Brazeal
How could thought ever benefit from being formed in poetic language rather than philosophical prose? This essay attempts to clarify a single, relatively narrow respect in which poetry can perform philosophical work that prose, as such, cannot: the evasion of philosophical dogmatism through Stevensian qualification. What Helen Vendler in an early essay calls Stevens’ “qualified assertions,” and what Marjorie Perloff calls Stevens’ “ironic modes," are the basic techniques of Wallace Stevens' anti-dogmatic art.
The Alleged Pragmatism Of T.S. Eliot, Gregory Brazeal
The Alleged Pragmatism Of T.S. Eliot, Gregory Brazeal
Gregory Brazeal
Before gaining recognition as a poet, T.S. Eliot pursued a doctoral degree in philosophy. His dissertation on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley has been a source of longstanding critical dispute. Some read the dissertation as a defense of Bradley’s views, while others read it as a repudiation of Bradley in favor of a kind of American philosophical pragmatism. This essay considers whether the dissertation can be properly characterized as pragmatist, despite Eliot’s enthusiastic and repeated dismissals of William James’ philosophy of truth. Eliot comes closest to a Jamesian view of belief when he writes of the endless ways we can …