Background
Gunn, Giles Buckingham was born on January 9, 1938 in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Son of Buckingham Willcox and Janet (Fargo) Gunn.
( In Thinking Across the American Grain Giles Gunn makes ...)
In Thinking Across the American Grain Giles Gunn makes a major contribution to the current revival of pragmatism in America by showing how it provides the most critically resilient and constructive response to the intellectual challenges of postmodernism. Gunn reclaims and refurbishes elements of the pragmatic tradition that either have been lost or have undergone important changes and shows how newer critical approaches have strong roots in the pragmatic tradition. For Gunn, pragmatism is no longer concerned solely with the nature of knowledge and the meaning of truth. Because of its insistence on critical self-awareness, its opposition to closed systems of thought, and its concern with the ethical, political, and practical contexts of ideas, pragmatism offers a blueprint for performing intellectual work in a world without absolutes. The world Gunn's pragmatism recognizes is one of multiple truths, unstable interpretations, and competing interests. After critically reexamining the nature and scope of the pragmatic legacy, Gunn explores the way pragmatism successfully responds to conceptual and methodological controversies, from the rebirth of ideology, the spread of interdisciplinarity, and the development of the new historicism, to the revolt against theory, the erosion of public discourse, and the problematics of American civil religion. Drawing throughout on the work of William James, Henry James, Sr., John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Poirier, Stanley Cavell, Clifford Geertz, Frank Lentricchia, Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, and others, Gunn shows that pragmatism, because it offers a way of thinking across the categories of modern intellectual specializations, is located at the intersection of these critical, and often competitive, discourses. The postmodern challenge for the pragmatist thinker is not only how to render these different discourses conversible with one another, but how to turn the salient insights of each into elements of a new democratic and critical public culture, one able to counter the twin threats of ideology and solipsism. Giles Gunn is one of our most acclaimed contemporary critics, and this broad and ambitious book is certain to become one of the central works in the current revival of critical pragmatism and cultural studies.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226310779/?tag=2022091-20
(Studies the ways in which imaginative literature expresse...)
Studies the ways in which imaginative literature expresses religious meaning and considers the contribution of literary criticism to religious scholarship, maintaining that a reciprocity exists between literature and religion.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195024532/?tag=2022091-20
(This collection gathers together original essays dealing ...)
This collection gathers together original essays dealing with Melville's relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic otherness, and with religion. These essays are framed by a new, short biography by Robert Milder, an introduction by Giles Gunn, an illustrated chronology, and a bibliographical essay. Taken together, these pieces afford a fresh and searching set of perspectives on Melville's connections both with his own age and also with our own. This book makes the case, as does no other collection of criticism of its size, for Melville's commanding centrality to nineteenth-century American writing.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195142829/?tag=2022091-20
Religion educator English educator
Gunn, Giles Buckingham was born on January 9, 1938 in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Son of Buckingham Willcox and Janet (Fargo) Gunn.
Bachelor, Amherst College, 1959; student, Episcopalian Theological School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1959-1960; Master of Arts, University of Chicago, 1963; Doctor of Philosophy, University of Chicago, 1967.
Professor religion and literature University Chicago, 1966-1974. Professor religion and American studies University North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1974-1985. Professor English and Religion University Florida, 1984-1985.
Professor English University California, Santa Barbara, since 1985, chairman English department, 1993-1997, professor global and international studies, since 1998, chairman global studies, 2001—2005, chairman global and international studies, since 2005. Visiting assistant professor religion Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, 1973. Benedict Distinguished visiting professor religion Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, 1977.
William R. Kenan Distinguished visiting professor humanities College William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1983-1984. Humanities Distinguished visiting professor University Colorado, 1989. Eric Yoegelin Distinguished professor American Studies, University Munich, 1994-1995.
Director National Endowment of the Humanities summer seminars for college and university teachers, 1979, 81, 85, 94, for school teachers, 1987, 88, 89, 91. Consultant Library. of America.
(Giles Gunn's challenging new work is at once a passionate...)
( In Thinking Across the American Grain Giles Gunn makes ...)
(Studies the ways in which imaginative literature expresse...)
(This collection gathers together original essays dealing ...)
Board of directors Fund for Santa Barbara. Member Modern Language Association, American Academy Religion (director research and publications 1974-1977), American Studies Association, Society Religion, Arts and Contemporary Culture, Society American Phil., National Critics Book Circle.
Married Janet Mears Varner, December 29, 1969 (divorced July 1983). 1 child, Adam Buckingham. Married Deborah Rose Sills, July 9, 1983.
1 child, Abigail Rose.