Alone with America: Cavell, Emerson, and the Politics of Individualism

Abstract

No ONE ever accused Ralph Waldo Emerson of being predictable, so it is fitting, perhaps, that the critical reconstruction of Emerson over the past decade and a half has produced a figure who little resembles the 'Yankee sage of American Studies at midcentury. The old Emerson was energetic but wild, inspiring but misty, brilliant on the level of the sentence and even paragraph but a house of cards when it came to cumulative power and compelling, overall coherence. But the new Emerson is something else. Increasingly, his work has been placed on the front burner of American cultural critique by some of the most intelligent, persuasive, and revisionist critics at work in the American academy, and the critical stakes which change hands in his name have never been higher. Driven in part by the growing influence of Marxist theory in American Studies and the challenging politicization of culture by ideological critiques of all kinds, the current interest is centered less on the transcendentalist trying to make his break and his peace with the religious tradition, and more on the promise and peril of liberal individualism as it is mapped in his essays and lectures. The new Emerson is less an untamed metaphysician than a powerful and persuasive stylist, a serious philosopher, and an incisive if problematic social and cultural critic.2 But no one has had more to do with Emerson's renascence than the