HABITS OF MODERNISM Pragmatic Modernism by Li si Schoenbach. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 224. $45.00 cloth.What does it mean to practice pragmatic literary criticism?1 For majority of twentieth century, there appeared to be little overlap between pragmatic and literary lines of inquiry. In 1950s, at a moment when pragmatism was being heralded almost official philosophy of America, New Criticism's open hostility towards pragmatist thinking restricted its influence on literary studies.-' With rise of deconstruction and post-structuralism, pragmatism remained relegated to sidelines of literary study. By 1980s, however, pragmatist thought began to gain traction in literature departments in America. An important catalyst for a literary turn towards pragmatism was Richard Rorty's influential challenge to representationalist theories of language and perception in Philosophy and Mirror of Nature (1979). Rather than a mirror that reflects and clarifies reality, language is for Rorty radically contingent core of all experience. His contention that linguistic redescription can remake world has resonated strongly with critics invested in idea that literary language not only illuminates, but also potentially transforms, conditions of living.Rorty has been called the foremost proponent of American pragmatist thought, though his own professed preference is to be characterized as someone who tried to retrieve some stuff in Dewey that . . . was in danger of being forgotten. And yet, in Rorty's estimation, this project of retrieval has little to offer people studying literature.' His contention would seem to be confirmed by dearth of literary critics who have looked to John Dewey a guiding figure, even pragmatism's significance for study of literature has been established over past thirty years.4 Lisi Schoenbach's declaration that Dewey is the unassuming philosophical hero of her book Pragmatic Modernism (2012) serves a welcome corrective to Rorty's dismissal and to Dewey's wider neglect in literary studies (10).Like Rorty, Schoenbach credits John Dewey with pioneering a mode of investigation into sudden or novel encounters (13). In Rorty's interpretation, term recontextualization describes way we accommodate small and large-scale paradigm shifts by reweaving our webs of beliefs and desires in response to change. On one end of spectrum are routine calculations that allow us to assimilate minor alterations into social fabric of daily life. At other end of continuum are dramatic transformations like those spurred by revolutionary science or politics.5 While Rorty's discussion of recontextualization focuses on history of Western philosophy, Schoenbach unexpectedly finds Dewey's recontextualizing logic powerfully at work in literary modernism. Her suggestion that figures like Henry James and Gertrude Stein took a recontextualizing approach to modern change counters a long tradition of modernist literary criticism that relies on what she calls the ideology of break. To this day, Schoenbach argues, modernism continues to be defined by its celebration of heroic opposition, its clean break from past, its antiinstitutional stand, and its emphasis on shock and radical discontinuity (4). As she shows, dominant narrative of modernism-as-break frequently occludes an equally strong modernist investment in more gradual and continuous processes of incorporating change into framework of experience (3). For pragmatic modernist, a moment of radical rupture cannot be understood in isolation from its animating and resulting conditions. As each of writers and thinkers of Schoenbach's study recognizes, violent upheaval catalyzes sustainable social change and meaningful aesthetic innovation only to extent that those transformations are integrated into an ongoing praxis of life. …