The book is a collection of chapters on the work of Charles S. Peirce that grew out of conversations between the authors over the last decade and a half. The chapters focus primarily on Peirce's consideration of realism and idealism as philosophical outlooks. Some deal directly with Peirce's accounts of realism and idealism; others look to the consequences of these accounts for other features of Peirce's overall philosophical system."--Publisher's abstract.

Griffith (psychiatry and African and African American studies, Yale U.) engages in dialogue with pioneering black psychiatrist Pierce. They meld his life and career, focusing on his theories about the predictable nature of racist behavior and the responses of oppressed groups, and how his own experience with racism has affected his work. In addition to his work on racism, Pierce is known for his substantive scholarship on coping with extreme environments such as the South Pole. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This radical reevaluation of one of the foundational figures of semiotics presents Peirce as the theorist of the “machinery of talk” rather than of the mind and its contents. The book is a genealogy of Peirce’s writings on signs that seeks to account for the changes displayed across forty years of his work. The author’s comprehensive knowledge of Peirce’s work brings an incisive understanding to his notoriously elaborate and complex theory of signs, at the same time challenging some standard readings in Peirce scholarship. Freadman introduces the postulate of “genre” in order to argue that the transformation of materials from one genre in and by the objectives of another can account for the modifications in sign theory observable through the course of Peirce’s career. The Machinery of Talk engages on a theoretical level with general issues in semiotics, taking Peirce’s writings as a case study through which to investigate the adequacy of a theory of signs to account for the way “talk” works. It finds that “the sign” is inadequate without the accompanying postulate of “genre.”

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This radical re-evaluation of some standard debates surrounding Peirce’s theory of signs presents new interpretations of his work by studying his writings genealogically. Freadman uses the term genre to access Peirce’s work, and expands this original theoretical approach by proposing that “genre” interacts with “sign” and that this interaction is central to the study of the semiotic in general.

Rethinking Postmodernism(s) revisits three historical sites of American literary postmodernism: the early postmodernism of Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1961), the emancipatory postmodernism of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and the late or post-postmodernism of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002). For the first time, it confronts these texts with the pragmatist philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, staging a conceptual dialogue between pragmatism and postmodernism that historicizes and recontextualizes customary readings of postmodern fiction. The book is a must-read for all interested in current reassessments of literary postmodernism, in new critical dialogues between seminal postmodern texts, and in recent attempts to theorize the ‘post-postmodern’ moment.