Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics

Explores the cultural work of two important early-twentieth-century writers: the poet William Carlos Williams and the educator/philosopher John Dewey, both key figures in American democracy.

Placing the philosopher John Dewey and the poet William Carlos Williams together―two important figures of twentieth-century American culture―this book examines the ambitions and failings of progressive liberal culture during the first half of the twentieth century. This book shows that, while their work ostensibly shares little in common, Williams and Dewey share the ambition to realize the radical potential of a democratic cultural politics. Including close readings of texts like Williams’s Spring and All, In the American Grain, and Paterson, and Dewey’s Individualism Old and New and Art as Experience, Beck offers an important contribution to current debates over the relationship between politics and cultural production.