Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- 2. Early Encounters: Sidney Hook, Richard J. Bernstein, and George Novak.- 3. Resuscitating Georg Lukács: Form, Metaphysics, and the Idea of a New Realism.- 4. “Kunst hat soviel Chance wie die Form”: Theodor W. Adorno and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture.- 5. “This morning I read as angels read”: Self-Creation, Aesthetics, and the Crisis of Black Politics in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess.- 6. Marxism, Pragmatism, and Narrative.- 7. Marxism, Pragmatism, and Postcritique.- 8. From Finding to Making: Jacques Rancière, Richard Rorty, and the Antifoundationalist Story of Progress.- 9. Stories of Emancipation and the Idea of Creative Praxis: Karl Marx and John Dewey.- 10. Conclusion.

About the Author

Ulf Schulenberg teaches American studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. He is the author of Zwischen Realismus und Avantgarde: Drei Paradigmen für die Aporien des Entweder-Oder (2000), Lovers and Knowers: Moments of the American Cultural Left (2007), and Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture (2015), as well as the coeditor of Americanization-Globalization—Education (2003) and a special issue on American Rock Journalism (2017). He has published widely in the fields of literary and cultural theory, American and European intellectual history, and American studies.