Flowers for Louise Gluck, or On the Possible Uses of Poetic Pragmatism

Abstract

May not a “sorceress”/poet be “a pragmatist at heart” (Louise Gluck)? How does her “sorcery” — to quote the Nobel jury: using “poetic voice” to make “individual existence universal” — communicate and work in her readers? How may the notion of language as experience inherited from the pragmatist tradition inform literary pedagogy in the age of globalization? A sample of recent (December 2020) readings of Louise Gluck’s poems by Moscow University students is considered, including their judgments on the measure and scope of the poet’s “universality”. Slow motion, experiential reading inviting “disentrenchment” of the subject position is suggested as a useful alternative to text-centredness and insistence on the unique and holistic nature of the cultural context.