Generally, modernism combines compositional and psychological innovation; Jamesian modernism – understood as a line of thought developed initially by William James and further elaborated by the Anglo-American mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and others – takes as its starting point several distinctive features of James’s physiological psychology. James himself extended these into his highly innovative philosophical inquiries as well as the psychical research that increasingly intrigued him in the decades following his immersion in investigations that were far less problematic scientifically. Aside from Whitehead, whose own innovations are indispensable for an adequate understanding of the ramifications of Jamesian modernism, important cross-disciplinary contributions to this line of thought include the literary/linguistic investigations of figures ranging from Henry James and Gertrude Stein to Thomas Pynchon and Lyn Hejinian; work by their peers in the arts (Marsden Hartley, Robert Motherwell, Agnes Martin) and sciences (Niels Bohr, Barbara McClintock, James J. Gibson, C.H. Waddington); the physiological aesthetics of Susanne K. Langer; mid-century literary criticism (William Empson, Paul de Man); and recent science studies (Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers). Much important twentieth-century American poetry is either strongly Jamesian modernist in tenor or, like T.S. Eliot’s, engaged in defending itself against Jamesian modernist claims.