Why does William James matter for literary studies? And what can the practice of literary criticism bring to our reading of James? While James is widely credited as a founding figure for the fields of psychology, philosophy, religious studies, and progressive education, his equal significance for the field of literary criticism has been comparatively neglected. This volume’s chapters model a variety of literary critical approaches to reading James, while investigating James’s equally various approaches to literature. Our introduction aims to draw out some of the generative through-lines among these approaches and to spell out some of their broader implications for how we read, teach, and respond to literature. As we hope to show in each section of the volume, the work of William James historically informs and prospectively transforms the way we think about the bedrock premises of literary study – namely, style, influence, and method.

Across the disciplinary reconsideration this volume explores, we wish to further note how the persistent richness of James’s work and the ongoing relevance of literary study itself are rooted in similar commitments: For both, any critical investigation must synchronously value expression, edification, and application. We foreground these stakes – the aesthetic, the transmissive, the practical – because together they comprise an ideal bridge between James and literary study, a mutual paradigm that we contend is fundamentally pedagogical in nature. This is to claim that James’s profuse legacy remains most vital and most literary when we center his comprehensive devotion to the art, occupation, and practices of conveying and receiving thought and feeling. The three parts of this book – on Style, Influence, and Method – unfold and elaborate these three facets of James’s pedagogical paradigm as they manifest first in the rousing character of his sentences, then in the impactful disseminations of his formative relationships, and finally in his uniquely programmatic responsiveness to the urgent issues of his time. This is not to say that every chapter here makes James’s method and practice of teaching its explicit subject. We do want to suggest, however, that when reading James, it is often helpful to recall, as Jane Thrailkill reminds us, that the Greek root of pedagogy translates as “I lead or guide the child.” We might, in other words, usefully envision and position James as a guide who leads students and other teachers – of psychology, philosophy, religion, as well as literature – through the often-circuitous process of enriching and expanding one’s understanding of a given subject, whether he is discussing the fluidity of consciousness, the malleability (or fixity) of belief, or the transformative power of art.

Our pedagogical framing of this book is intended to highlight and elucidate James’s distinctive approach to leading a broad array of listeners and readers towards personalized discovery. Sometimes this guidance arrives in conventional sites of pedagogy (lecture halls, textbooks), but just as often James ushers us through learning processes far afield of the classroom. When we frame the book’s sections on Style, Influence, and Method in terms of the artfulness, diffusiveness, and usefulness of teaching, we are talking about teaching in the most expansive sense of the word – teaching understood as modelling in act or language how to do something, even when that “something” is as nebulous as a fledgling idea or incipient feeling.

In the Style section, we watch James show how syntactical and rhetorical tools might be applied to a range of textual and paratextual objects – poems by Whitman and Wordsworth (this volume, Duckworth, New, and Weissman; Clune), diagrams of brain anatomy and optical illusions (this volume, Thrailkill; DeSantis), or the affective “feelings of relation” that moderate James’s practice of aesthetic education and his fit within an aesthetic lineage (this volume, Shusterman; Richardson) (PP 259). When we draw out the pedagogical dimensions of Jamesian style we become newly attuned to the implicit aesthetic achievement of sentences, citations, and illustrations that may otherwise be overlooked as commonsense or utilitarian. We also begin to see how James succeeds in making guidance feel like companionable encouragement rather than authoritative instruction – and how James himself learned from this kind of mentoring relationship.

While most accounts of Jamesian influence focus on how James’s teaching shaped the work of many of his well-known students, our Influence section traces less predictable lines of transmission. To expand the story of Professor James beyond discussions of direct influence is to heed James’s primary pedagogical insight: We learn through experiences that scale beyond classrooms and laboratories. This more capacious model of educational influence allows us to discern a far-reaching array of writers and thinkers who are using Jamesian ideas to navigate both their aesthetic commitments and their everyday lives.

The final Methods section elaborates James’s core tendency to conceive of teaching and learning practices as life practices, an elision that inextricably draws together James’s philosophical, psychological, and pedagogical methods. The key question underwriting James’s philosophical method of pragmatism – what difference does it make if x is true? – is intended to ensure that academic activities are not sequestered in college campuses and scholarly journals. The pragmatic method demands that theoretical propositions be rigorously and continuously tested as platforms for practical action. This testing is an educative process insofar as James provides us with a series of questions to be asked again and again over the course of life, allowing us to serve as our own teachers, and to be lifelong students of our own experience.

James’s pedagogical project converges with the premises of literary study where he takes a tacit approach to transmitting thought and feeling with sentences that enact rather than explain, show rather than tell. As many chapters attest, the formative force of James’s teachings stems from his commitment to experience over explication. Several essays extend this commitment by working to enact Jamesian experiences in prose experiments of their own. Others take a more familiar literary critical approach, developing lucid explanations of James’s sometimes elusive strategies of enactment. Each elucidation affirms the equally important pedagogical work performed by the explanatory function of criticism. Whether tacitly or explicitly, all the chapters that follow show how immeasurably our criticism and pedagogy are enriched by the Jamesian tutelage we find manifest in his implicit style, indirect influence, and quotidian methods.

Style

As Richard Shusterman argues in his chapter (and elsewhere), it is difficult to establish a Jamesian approach to art because he actively resisted schematizing his ideas about painting, sculpture, music, theatre, and literature into an overarching aesthetic theory.Footnote ¹ James avoided making general statements about the arts on the grounds that abstract principles or fixed definitions cannot do justice to the ineffable qualities that characterize powerful aesthetic experiences. While James’s engagement with literature is particularly pervasive, it can be easily overlooked because it so often manifests at the level of style – in overtures to his audience, in his strategic use of illustrative quotation, and in his efforts to evoke feelings that evade articulation. To map a Jamesian aesthetics is therefore to undertake the patient, painstaking work of analyzing individual sentences and figures, while also tracking James’s rhetoric and tropes across his vast oeuvre – work that is individually and collectively performed by contributors to this volume.

James’s style registers his recognition that our capacity for aesthetic experience depends on aesthetic education – on actively cultivating our receptivity to facets of daily life that might otherwise pass unnoticed. As we’ve suggested, he often takes a tacit approach to this kind of cultivation, creating the conditions for aesthetic encounters rather than spelling out explicit instructions. James’s implicit art of teaching is guided by his core educational insight: We learn by doing. By now, this truism has been repeated to the point of cliché. James in fact intended for his insights to feel like common sense because learning by doing involves making ideas our own. For this reason, James’s practical pedagogy relies on what can be read as his commonplace style.

Jamesian style is commonplace in several senses of the word: It feels ordinary and unpretentious, it can tend towards generality, and it incorporates a great deal of quotation – much of it literary. James’s coinages are often straightforward so they can be easily internalized and put to use.Footnote ² We might consider, for instance, how often the phrase “stream of consciousness” is used by students (and sometimes teachers) who don’t know its origins in The Principles of Psychology (1890).Footnote ³ His formulations can feel quite general when he offers constructions capacious enough to accommodate the widest possible range of listeners and readers. This generality recalls the Greek root of commonplace, koinos topos, which refers to general themes or arguments applicable to many particular cases. When translated into classical Latin, locus communis, the emphasis falls on the communal and spatial resonances of the phrase. James’s commonplace style helps his audience find the kind of common ground we seek in our classrooms. When we establish common terms and shared frameworks, we open spaces for constructive conversations and community building.

James’s style might also be described as commonplace in the sense that his ample use of quotation can make his talks and essays feel like pages torn from a commonplace book (a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied). This citation practice has the effect of decentering and dispersing James’s authorial voice towards further collectivizing his pedagogy. Commonplace books most often draw from literary sources and James frequently looked to literature to explore and convey experiences that eluded the discursive conventions of his home disciplines, psychology and philosophy. At the same time, he draws from an astonishing variety of sources throughout his oeuvre – from physiology textbooks, to conversion narratives, to naturalist travel logs, to a pamphlet by a “crack-brained” mystic credited with sparking the psychedelics revolution (ECR 286).Footnote ⁴ James’s dedication to reading across various fields of experience and expertise reflects his commitment to the whole situation of learning and to the whole personhood of the learner.

In the same way that James’s unsystematic aesthetics can obscure his contributions to aesthetic education, his commonplace style can occlude his cultivation of what might be understood as a kind of a transdisciplinary commons for learning. Guided by James’s commitment to finding common conversational ground between teachers and learners, scholars and laypeople, our volume is framed by two conversations that bring Jamesian pedagogy to the fore. We open with an exchange among several scholars and educators who have followed James’s lead in founding new kinds of learning commons, each devoted to integrating poetic, psychological, and pedagogic insights into daily living. In their wide-ranging discussion of James’s Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, Elisa New, Angela Duckworth, and Ross Weissman bring their experiences of reaching audiences outside the academy to bear on the question of what James has to offer teachers of all kinds.Footnote ⁵ They elaborate the communicative power of his lecturing and writing to emphasize engagement, integration, and interest as hallmarks of James’s pedagogical style. As New notes, these principles often seem at odds with scholarly approaches to literary criticism, which too often privilege detachment, suspicion, and specialization. The form of their contribution – a live, transcribed conversation – embodies James’s understanding of knowledge as collaborative labor with unknown outcomes: “a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done” (P 139).

Jane Thrailkill’s alignment of the instructive aims and literary effects of Jamesian style underlines 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.

Alicia DeSantis extends Thrailkill’s line of inquiry, locating the Jamesian principle of practice at the heart of his distinctive style. Unpacking James’s use of diagrams, instructions, illustrations, and other modes of reader provocation, DeSantis provides a topography of Jamesian style as it emerges from his understanding of consciousness and its relation to the world. For DeSantis, as for Thrailkill, James’s style is deeply pedagogical: that is, concerned less with the representation of ideas as such than with the effective power of words (and images) on a given reader’s mind. Indeed, DeSantis corrects a crucial misunderstanding of Jamesian style by relocating his primary site of experimentation from the sentences on the page to the ever-shifting interaction between reader and text.

In James’s “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “A World of Pure Experience,” Michael Clune locates a tacit, non-formalizable practice of aesthetic education, defined as “a process of perceptual, spiritual, intellectual, and psychological transformation and renewal through the study of works of art.” Pointing to the way that literary works communicate a previously unavailable “vital experience,” James upholds the pedagogical power of art to overturn and expand current categories of understanding – including those categories by which we would codify them. In this account of James’s aesthetics, its often-observed non-systematic quality is no accident: Art’s power for us emerges from our living, often entangled encounter with it – and with its capacity to challenge our existing frameworks of experience.

Like Clune, Richard Shusterman emphasizes James’s resistance to systematic or formalized aesthetics, provocatively framing James’s relationship to the aesthetic writ large as characterized by willful repression on the part of the young James, who abandoned his ambitions as an artist to undertake medical training. We can understand James’s privileging of the experience of the ineffable in his epistemology, theory of mind, ethics, and ontology, Shusterman argues, as a “return of the repressed” – a resurgence of what was for James a deep, original attachment to the experience of art. Taking as his starting point James’s conspicuous silence about the aesthetic per se, Shusterman suggests that for James, aesthetics are nowhere because they are everywhere, not codified in any theory but brilliantly present in James’s practices of writing and living.

Joan Richardson traces James’s style back to that of his “spiritual godfather,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, in her lyric meditation on their “intimacy of relation.” She suggests that this relation “has remained hidden in plain sight because it is, in fact, at the level of the sentence – in the word choices, syntax, grammar, and rhythm of James’s sentences” – that this intimacy resides. Demonstrating on the axis of style the way that finite, individual human consciousness registers the infinite flux of experience, James, like Emerson before him, offers “a secular, scientific version of the description of God – center everywhere and circumference nowhere.” With particular attention to the Jamesian key words interest and vague, Richardson illuminates the web of language – of style, in its most expansive sense – that connects James not only to his great nineteenth-century forebear, but also to his contemporaries and inheritors, including Wallace Stevens and the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

Influence

To understand how Jamesian pedagogy might newly inflect our understanding of literary influence, it is helpful to reconsider the role of the classroom in our history of the discipline. When we do talk about James’s influence in literary studies, it is often to acknowledge how many important literary figures passed through his Harvard labs and lecture halls, including Gertrude Stein, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. As a trailblazing teacher of psychology and philosophy, James’s ideas about consciousness, time, and belief helped to define the culture of modernism.Footnote ⁶ Following James’s ascendency during the modernist period, accounts of his waxing and waning influence are frequently folded into narratives of the “decline” and “resurgence” of pragmatism – the philosophical method with which he is most closely aligned.Footnote ⁷ We won’t rehearse these “revival narratives” here except to note that when we limit our understanding of James’s pedagogical influence to a story of direct transmission – to the formative effect he had on those he taught – we neglect the equally formative role James has played in shaping classrooms beyond his own.Footnote ⁸

The literary critic Richard Poirier argues that pragmatist pedagogy did not in fact need reviving in English departments because Jamesian methods have been practiced continuously in literature classes over the last hundred years. He reinserts the classroom into the history of literary study by drawing a pedagogical line from Ralph Waldo Emerson to James, from James to Robert Frost, and from Frost to Poirier by way of Reuben Brower, the founder of a General Education course he taught at Harvard through the 1950s and 60s called “Hum 6.”Footnote ⁹ Poirier credits Hum 6 with teaching students how to “read pragmatically” – a practice that differed starkly from the era’s most prominent critical techniques: “reading ideally remained in motion, not choosing to encapsulate itself, as New Critical readings nearly always ultimately aspire to do.”Footnote ¹⁰

In contrast to the New Critics’ goal of arriving at the “total meaning” of a text, Poirier identified a pragmatist method of practicing “the art of not arriving” at decisive conclusions or general theories.Footnote ¹¹ Poirier aligns this unending approach to reading pragmatically with a “species of linguistic criticism” he finds in James’s “anti-foundationalism.”Footnote ¹² While this brand of pragmatist pedagogy has long been practiced and disseminated by teachers, it is infrequently reified in print: Its privileging of adaptable and provisional practices better suits the fluid scene of the classroom than the fixative scene of publication. So, what would it look like to register in writing such a kinetic, diffuse understanding of James’s influence on the way we read? To bring the pedagogical practice of pragmatist literary criticism into print without fixing its dynamism? As the essays in our Influence section suggest, we might begin by tracing more surprising and circuitous (this volume, Meyer; Breitenwischer; Hawkins), vague and open-ended (this volume, Grimstad; Knoper; Epstein), circuits of Jamesian transmission and transformation.

Bridging our sections on Style and Influence, Steven Meyer demonstrates how three radically renovated strains of empiricism – philosophical, scientific, and literary – meet in what he calls “Jamesian modernism.” In Meyer’s expanded use of the phrase, Jamesian modernism describes a cross-disciplinary line of thought inaugurated by James’s groundbreaking account of physiological psychology, and further developed by Alfred North Whitehead, as well as many other formative figures working across the arts and sciences through the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. In tracing this wide-ranging lineage, we emerge with a more intricate understanding of James’s highly original models of relation and time. As Meyer’s chapter powerfully demonstrates, to attend to the full complexity of James’s “robust empiricism” is to realize the profound implications of his more capacious forms of modernism for literary studies.

Like Meyer and Richardson, Dustin Breitenwischer sees James in the light of a diverse lineage that both precedes and follows him. Drawing James into conversation with Emerson and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Breitenwischer reframes James’s description of suffering exemplified by “the sick soul” as a spiritual experience that entails “both a challenge to and an origin of hermeneutic openness.” Breitenwischer argues that James’s autobiographical account of suffering as the origin of “the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world” situates him in a long tradition of understanding the experience of suffering as essentially pedagogical: In disclosing a distance between the sufferer and their world, suffering generates the creative energy that motivates its own overcoming.

Paul Grimstad contributes to the rich vein of scholarly literature around the relationship between William and Henry James in his exploration of the latter’s presentation of consciousness – and attempts to probe it – in Washington Square. Drawing on William’s “conception of truth as a matter of inductive fallibilism” as well as his psychology of religious belief, Grimstad uncovers the dynamic at the center of the novel: The struggle between the overbearing Dr. Sloper and his daughter Catherine, whose consciousness moves, through the course of the novel, out of the reach of his ability to probe and thus control it. Concluding with an articulation of the novel’s “ethics of opacity” – its refusal of our urge toward the fixation of belief – Grimstad’s essay provides a granular case study of the deep resonance between the brothers’ thinking and writing.

Like Thrailkill, Stephanie Hawkins asserts the centrality of James’s psychology to his public-facing philosophy. Recovering his vital contributions to group psychology, Hawkins elaborates James’s dynamic conceptualization of what she calls “the modernist public sphere.” Theorizing conversion as a site of interrelation and exchange between individuals and the social sphere, James provides a key link between personal and social transformation: particularly that cultural transformation we call modernism. As Hawkins contends, “James’s descriptive analysis of the psychological processes of conversion establishes a theoretical framework for the transmission of ideas and the shaping of public opinion in the first half of the twentieth century.”

While Hawkins and Meyer expand our understanding of Jamesian modernism, Andrew Epstein extends the story of Jamesian influence beyond the modernist period. Tracing the origins of and critical responses to the much-discussed “crisis of attention” in twenty-first-century life, Epstein places James at the heart of the growing field of “attention studies” and locates in contemporary American poetry a particularly rich field for theorizing attention and its shifting limits. As Epstein convincingly demonstrates, Jamesian attention – and its relevance to aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and psychology – is crucial to the work of poetry in the postwar era.

Our section on James’s wide-ranging influence concludes with Randall Knoper’s instructive comparison of James’s integrated view of consciousness with the view of contemporary neuroscientists who clearly delineate nonconscious elements of mind. Echoing James’s call for “a reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life,” Knoper looks to restore expansive, inchoate elements of mind into a model of consciousness that encompasses nebulous states now deemed “nonconscious” (BC 150). Unpacking the aesthetic implications of James’s insistence on the fundamental vagueness of consciousness, Knoper draws his chapter into conversation with the considerations of pragmatist aesthetics by Shusterman, Clune, and Richardson.

Methods

As both a teacher and scholar, James demands that our lines of intellectual inquiry have meaningful consequences for lived experience. Just as Jamesian pedagogy requires the applicability of educational instruction beyond conventional classrooms, James’s pragmatist method insists on testing academic theories outside the confines of school. If, as we have argued, it is difficult to properly register the pedagogical transmission of Jamesian ideas, that difficulty is compounded by James’s further insistence that classroom learning must meaningfully extend into everyday life. As teachers and as students, James insists, we must ask again and again: What difference does this book, this line of scholarly inquiry, make in our daily lives? For James, meaningful differences often resist easy articulation, and will therefore exceed most conventional learning outcomes. When genuinely transformative learning takes place, when we make real discoveries, we often don’t yet have the language or framework to describe what we’ve learned.

When we try to reckon with such fundamental shifts in thinking and feeling, it can be as if James is too far inside our ways of thinking, reading, and writing – too closely connected to the particulars of our experience – to be easily or fully registered from the outside. If this is the case, it is surely by design. James’s commitment to experience – to the local and emergent qualities of knowledge, its always-embeddedness – made him resistant to the kind of overarching methodological claim-making through which disciplinary shifts are often registered. We can’t credit (or blame) James for any of the turns or counterturns within literary studies in recent decades. We can, however, locate a Jamesian impulse in our desire to connect our experiences of literature to our experiences of living, and a Jamesian insight in our capacity for changing our own and others’ minds. This substratum of our everyday thinking and acting was the level at which James’s own pedagogy was aimed, and as happens with the best teachers, his image has receded as his lessons have become more thoroughly the basic material of our own thought.

Recovery of the diffuse Jamesian inheritance within methodological conversations in literary studies requires us to recall James’s interest in what happens on the cusp of what is known – on the fringes of consciousness or in the absorption of a new belief. As the chapters in this section demonstrate, James’s expanded understanding of what it means to know sheds new light on current disciplinary conversations around the structures of critique (this volume, Gaskill; Bieger), the relationship between literary study and climate crisis (this volume, Dancer; Sehgal), and the significance of the category of “experience” for our understanding of race and national identity (this volume, Wells; Muyumba). These conversations remind us of the difference Jamesian paradigms offer to thinking, and through thinking, to our experience and engagement with the world.

Jamesian thinking extends into worldmaking in Nicholas Gaskill’s reading of “The Will to Believe.” Reframing James’s account of the relationship between belief and reality as “the will to make believe,” Gaskill attunes us to the special category of conviction involved in literary experience. What Coleridge calls “poetic faith” – famously defined as “the willing suspension of disbelief” – has the power, Gaskill contends, to act as “an instance of pragmatist world-building and reality testing.” Enabling us to engage and imagine new realities, these literary forms of belief invite modes of experience that we, as readers and critics, can ill-afford to abandon. Laura Bieger’s expansive account of Jamesian consciousness similarly illuminates the central role of the literary imagination in worldmaking. While literary studies are still dominated by “psychoanalytical models of consciousness as a mechanism of suppression and censorship,” Bieger finds compelling alternatives in James’s model of a permeable mind/world relation. For Bieger, as for Gaskill, James’s radically receptive method of reading grounds more socially convicted and committed approaches to literature.

Thom Dancer’s essay on climate despair also looks to James for resources that might help us meet the urgent demands of our fraught present and imperilled future. Dancer turns to The Varieties of Religious Experience to suggest that James’s vivid (and semi-autobiographical) account of “the sick soul” provides a powerful touchstone for how to actively face dread, anxiety, and fear – all rational responses to the climate crisis – without being paralyzed into inaction. As Dancer ultimately affirms, James’s methods for converting belief to action, for inhabiting uncertainty, and for confronting the reality of our damaged world, offer critical guidance in navigating “the spiritual impasse at the heart of the Anthropocene.” Melanie Sehgal historicizes James’s relevance for our Anthropocene epoch by revisiting his response to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Comparing the crises of James’s time to those of our own, she identifies pragmatism and radical empiricism as philosophical responses to “worlds being shaken up in multiple ways.” To reanchor Jamesian philosophy in cataclysm is to demonstrate its use-value for reorienting extractivist habits of mind towards alternate modes of inhabiting our planet.

Hannah Wells’s chapter recovers the materialist roots of Jamesian thought in the work of the philosopher and logician Charles Peirce, who James credits as the father of pragmatism. By privileging pragmatism’s anti-foundationalism, Wells argues, recent articulations of pragmatism have obscured a materialist account of experience, which might more meaningfully ground our critical engagements with race. With this return to the origins of pragmatist philosophy, Wells reclaims James for our contemporary moment, and for the future of literary study. This future orientation is shared by Walton Muyumba, whose exploration of the poetry of Derek Walcott both describes and practices a critical “stereovision,” in which Jamesian pragmatism and Walcott’s hybridized, postcolonial poetic practices productively refract one another, helping to “illuminate a new direction for Jamesian theorizing in literary studies.”

Notably, several of these essays in Methods depart from the traditionally bounded terrain of the literary (i.e., novels, poems, and plays), grounding themselves instead in the lived realities of racialized experience and climate crisis. This expanded range is reflective of literary studies at large, which, in response to the overlapping crises of our time, has brought the tools of analysis and critique to bear on a wide array of interdisciplinary problems and conversations. While Jamesian ways of thinking can sometimes seem out-of-step with disciplinary trends, the committed worldliness of literary studies today is a particularly fertile site of common ground. Like James’s own work, which was always slipping restrictive disciplinary bonds and attaching itself to category-defying experience, literary studies has become home to a whole host of concerns beyond literature – a development this section reflects.

Coda

We conclude this volume as it began, with a second dialogue that is similarly animated by James’s twin commitments to philosophy as conversation and pedagogy as lived experience. Our own collaborative experiment likewise shifts between perspectives, but also between “academic” and “personal” registers in an effort to render visible the web of relations from which our Jamesian conversions emerged. In framing our experiences of Jamesian pedagogy as conversionary, we build on a central insight developed by Joan Richardson – a formative mentor for both of us – over the course of her career-long engagement with James: “The singular feature of conversation,” she writes in Pragmatism and American Experience, “is the conversion of the shape of an idea from one form into another.”Footnote ¹³ Our dialogue seeks to convert James’s discursive ideas about education into scenes of lived encounter – between teachers and students, bodies and minds, thinking and feeling – while honoring the possibilities for surprise that such encounters open. In this endeavor, we are also extending Hawkins’s work, which reminds us of how James uses the term conversion – meaning “to turn with” or “turn together” – to describe the process through which we come into transformative relation with someone or something other than ourselves. James’s dialectical, often gradual process of “educational” conversion seems to us to offer useful correctives to many incumbent histories of the discipline that would rely on entrenched and reductive genealogies of authority. By reconnecting James’s understanding of conversion with his commitment to conversation, we aim to give living voice to the cluster of deeply felt relations that constitute the life practices we call “teaching” and “learning.”