User:DeRossitt/Halfway to Revolution: Investigation and Crisis in the Work of Henry Adams, William James, and Gertrude Stein

Halfway to Revolution: Investigation and Crisis in the Work of Henry Adams, William James, and Gertrude Stein is a 1991 book by literary scholar and professor Clive Bush.

Overview
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Reception
Ihab Hassan in American Literature: Halfway to Revolution is a capable, capacious work, offering sustained, new readings of Adams, James, and Stein as these authors prefigure, and interestingly redefine, our condition. Free of jargon, resistant to cant, in approach catholic, using everything "that comes to hand" ... Halfway to Revolution is in some sense evasive, perhaps retrograde. retrograde. Halfway to what revolution, what kind of revolution? A Leninist one? A Maoist? Granting that the three major authors are "'modifying figures,' not revolutionary ones," what idea of radical change does Bush himself assume, what concept of power? References to science, technology, and corporate capitalism betray only an aura of leftish rectitude

a work of such genial erudition, literary civility, and historical acumen as to secure our enduring interest.

George Cotkin in American Studies: blasé. Bush's work is intended to be read at a variety of levels. It is, in part, an analysis of the work of Adams, James and Stein, but without any pretensions to complete coverage. It intends to bring Adams, James and Stein into a dialogue with contemporary theorists while also attempting to place these turn-of-the-century thinkers within their own intellectual contexts.

The title is somewhat deceptive or at least confusing. To this reader, exactly how Adams, James and Stein were "halfway to revolution*' remains obscure.

Douglas Tallack in Journal of American Studies: a fine and uncompromising study

his occasionally holier-than-thou stance

The main organizing theme of Halfway to Revolution is the new notion of "the social" and how Adams, James and Stein respond to its supposed eclipse of "the political."

Bush does persuade us that Adams, James and Stein were on to much of what mattered. In particular, it is their intimate understanding of how established discourses ("history for Adams, psychology for James, and the language of common sense and narrative structure for Stein") broke down under the impact of different dimensions of modernity (notably professionalization), which makes these three so enlightening, but so disturbing.

Earl N. Harbert in The New England Quarterly: no recent title makes a broader claim to relevance than does Halfway to Revolution. In reality Clive Bush has provided us with three books in one—a bargain despite the stiff price. He evaluates the contribution of each major author—Adams, James, and Stein—with detached intelligence and often valuable critical insight.

As these paragraphs suggest, Bush's discussion of Stein is alone enough to make Halfway to Revolution successful as an "open-ended" investigation.