Lovers and Knowers: Moments of the American Cultural Left

‘Lovers and Knowers’ discusses the development of the American cultural Left in the twentieth century. Seeking to contribute to the discussion of the relation between American Studies and the field of theory, the book focuses on the analysis of a specific theoretical problem. It attempts to elucidate the multilayered complexity of the relation between antifoundationalists and foundationalists, antitheorists and theorists, and (liberal) ironists and metaphysicians. Proposing the idea of an antifoundationalist and antiessentialist worldly and oppositional criticism, the study argues that it is possible to develop a postmetaphysical thinking whose notion of the political and whose understanding of the function of literary and cultural criticism clearly differ from those suggested by neopragmatists such as Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. It is demonstrated that Cornel West’s leftist version of neopragmatism, striving for consequences of theory in history, ought to be regarded as an oppositional and worldly criticism (in the Saidian sense) which dialectically uses the insights of (neo)pragmatist antifoundationalism.