ABSTRACT
Pragmatism has emerged within contemporary literary criticism in relation to two fundamental issues: the role of theory and the vocation of the humanistic intellectual. The most influential pragmatic literary critics such as Stanley Fish and Frank Lentricchia are masterful mappers; that is, they clearly situate and sort out various positions in the current debate and give some idea of what is at stake. Masterful mappers in the pragmatic grain such as Richard Rorty’s illuminating narratives about modern philosophy are demythologizers. Appropriate forms of demystification subsume the pragmatic lessons of demythologization, preserve a crucial role for theory as a social practice, and highlight how modes of interpretation “serve to sustain social relations which are asymmetrical with regard to the organization of power”. The chapter describes the versions of pragmatism on the current scene in reference to three major axes: namely, the levels of philosophy, theory and politics.
