Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson ed. by Mark C. Long and Sean Ross Meehan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson ed. by Mark C. Long and Sean Ross Meehan Shira Wolosky Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Mark C. Long and Sean Ross Meehan. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2018. 233 pp. This volume is, as might be expected, as much about teaching as it is about Emerson—which is to say, about teaching the humanities today under what emerges as more or less severe pressure. Almost every essay opens with remarks on how difficult it is to teach Emerson, how difficult to entice or seduce students, who have other priorities, to read and engage with him at all. It is a portrait of the academy today, valiantly attempting to uphold its commitment to liberal arts. One of the claims that emerges repeatedly throughout the volume is that liberal arts are closely tied to or embodied in Emerson himself. If one is going out to battle for creative individuality, Emerson is one's sword. In a sense, the very notion of creative individuality was invented by Emerson, at least on the American scene—although a persistent effort repeatedly through the volume is to show that Emerson is not just American, not just "provincial" or New Englandy, but "transnational," globalizable, post-colonial, as well as gender- and diversity-friendly. These are the flags in the battle to make Emerson "relevant" to today's students with other, better, more pressing business to do—just as Emerson himself warned, witnessing as he did the opening salvos of American industrial, commercial materialism that he again and again targets with his scorn and warning. Many essays include pedagogical strategies, and are often invitingly suggestive of techniques one may use for teaching Emerson and other writers. The portrait of the academy as a teaching scene becomes a portrait of the classroom as constituted today, where diversity, gender transformation, challenges to what had been the traditional American self-narrative, but again, above all, economic frameworks and pressures seem to define the educational spaces. Ironically, and this too was already part of Emerson's watch, that very economic drive is intrinsic to the American self-narrative of individualism, fulfilling rather than contesting it. It was Emerson's particular anxiety (with other of his contemporary writers, including Melville, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman) how to invest in the individual without reducing him (that was the gender back then) to sheer self-interest. It remains a core American challenge, one acted out in social terms [End Page 355] of privatization of interest and in political terms in indifference or hostility to larger community claims. Rarely in this volume is this central contradiction of American individualism as itself a form of American material self-interest engaged. Most essays, pursuing their main topic of how to teach—that is, get students to read—Emerson, veer towards the panegyric and apologetics. That is actually fine. Through the very varied approaches to Emerson that the volume offers, many gripping sides of his personality and work come into visibility, through a range of teaching methods, classroom strategies, and contexts for reading. These include the use of the new Collected Emerson which makes available Emerson's less familiar, unpublished, and journal writings, although there are many references and specific discussions of classic essays as well: "American Scholar" (Andrew Kopec), "Divinity School Address" (Corinne E. Blackmer) "Self-Reliance" (Wesley T. Mott), "Circles" (Nels Anchor Christensen), "Nature" (Michael P. Branch), and "Experience" (Branka Arsić). Several contributors (Ronald A. Bosco, Amy Ear-hart) discuss how these new textual studies help with access to Emerson's published essays, which are described in almost every essay as difficult, formally omitting the links between aphorisms first recorded in the journals and then lifted out into the lapidary self-citations that compose Emerson's essays. Turning to the journals is a repeatedly proposed teaching strategy, not only to see the contexts of Emerson's aphorisms but to show and to retheorize his writing as process, as acts of thinking, as fluid and exploratory and always in tension with any finished or fixed definition. This makes Emerson very contemporary and, indeed, is one of the powerful aspects...