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1 results

  • 2 - “Intellectual Larking”

  • from Part I - Style
  • Edited by Kate Stanley, University of Western Ontario, Kristen Case, The Monson Seminar
  • Book:
    William James and Literary Studies
    Published online:
    20 February 2026
    Print publication:
    19 February 2026, pp 32-50

  • Summary

    In this chapter, Jane Thrailkill aligns the instructive aims and literary effects of Jamesian style to underline the broader pedagogical purpose of literary criticism. Her reading of The Principles of Psychology analyzes what she describes as James’s “troping devices,” special literary tools intended to catalyze in his audience a process of “experiential, tactile, sensory education.” In this key early work, Thrailkill argues, James’s stylistic play seeks to “capture the mind in action” – to make the text itself into the kind of experience from which we learn, rather than a static description of that experience. As this essay establishes, James’s experiments in thinking and writing are everywhere motivated by his commitment to pedagogy, combined with his knowledge of how learning actually occurs.