Giles Gunn, who teaches in the Department of English and Global and International Studies Program at UCSB, will discuss his new book, Beyond Solidarity: Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World (University of Chicago Press, June, 2001) at 4 P.M. on Thursday, October 25 in the McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, copies of Beyond Solidarity will be available for purchase and signing at this event.

Beyond Solidarity is an impassioned argument for a sharable morality in a world increasingly fractured along lines of difference. Giles Gunn asks how human solidarity can be reconceived when its expressions have become increasingly exceptionalist and outmoded, and when the pressures of globalization divide as much as they unify. He finds the terms for answering these questions in a more inclusive, cosmopolitan pragmatism--one willing to explore fundamental values without recourse to absolutist arguments. Drawing on the work of William and Henry James, John Dewey, Primo Levi, Richard Rorty, and many others, as well as postcolonial writing, Jewish literature of the Holocaust, and the cultural and religious experience of African Americans in slavery, Gunn points pragmatism in a transnational direction and shows how it can better account for the consequences of diversity. Beyond Solidarity, then, is a study of the difference that difference makes in a globalized world.

"This book explores the most important issue on the current political and cultural scene: how to define a common morality and knowledge for a society in which the respect for difference has become the basic principle of both personal and social ethics. Beyond Solidarity finds in the philosophical tradition of pragmatism a method to complement postmodernism's rejection of universality so that it does not preclude thinking and evaluating in common. Gunn suggests how we can derive fundamental truths and values that ride with history and therefore underlie a solidarity of the different."--Myra Jehlen, author of American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent.

Giles Gunn, professor of English and Global & International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture, The Interpretation of Otherness: Literature, Religion, and the American Imagination, and F.O. Mathiessen: The Critical Achievement. He has served as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and University of California President's Research Fellow in the Humanities.

This event is sponsored by the UCSB Bookstore, Department of English, Global & International Studies Program, and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.