Literary Vocation as Occupational Idealism: The Example of Emerson's "American Scholar"

Abstract

he Emersonian strategy of the American literary intellectual may be so ingrained, so deeply organic to his or her sense of social self-positioning, that Ross Posnock, in Assessing the Oppositional: Contemporary Intellectual Strategies, can now accuse Jim Merod of an Emersonianism so unacknowledged that the latter need not even mention the Concord idealist in refiguring more responsible forms and affiliations of radical dissent. For whatever the impact of Foucault or Gramsci on American reassessments of the humanist intellectual, as in Paul Bove's portrayal of reader-response as the site of interpellation into middle-class acquiescence, the tropes and terms of Emerson as representative