| 英文摘要 |
The sweeping influence of Europe-based literary theory upon a new generation of students has brought great pressure upon the American community of literary studies. Traditionally a steadfast stronghold of behaviorism and empiricism, the community finds its foundation seriously challenged by theory's tendency to strip the subject of any autonomous standing of its own and an epistemology that undermines the self-manifest actuality of empirical facts. The most immediate problem seems to be that of asserting its own American identity while absorbing the new influence. Rising to answer the call for assistance is none but the best-known branch of indigenous American philosophy-pragmatism. For pragmatism, like structuralism and deconstruction, puts into doubt the autonomous self as well as the givenness of facts; yet at the same time, pragmatism heralds the socially-conditioned actuality of the self and the community-ratified status of facts. Thus while echoing anti-foundationalist tendencies in European literary theory, pragmatism turns theory's accompanying skepticism and nihilism into new concerns for the social and the political. And in that sense, the recent vogue of pragmatic positioning functions as the American line of defense against the invasion of European tendencies. |
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