Emerson's Essays Research Articles

Introduction to the Suite: Political education for human transformation

Abstract This is a brief introduction to the second part of a suite of papers on the theme ‘Political Education for Human Transformation’. Sceptical of the familiar and somewhat narrow frameworks for citizenship education, this East-West collaboration looks again at the very idea, and the possible means, of education for democracy. It examines the principle of an equality of voices as crucial to mature democratic citizenship, expanding on this through the idea of the ‘education of one's experience’. This is a matter not of introspection but rather of turning attention outward—towards the language we use, the way others are treated, works of art and popular culture—in order to be more critically awake and to experience more fully how the world comes to light. We introduce papers by Alexis Gibbs and Léa Boman, which respectively consider the reflections of de Tocqueville on democracy in the United States and Emerson's essay ‘Self-Reliance’. Together, these essays contribute to an understanding of the manner in which we are always already implicated in structures of power. They offer a redefinition of political subjectivity.

Literature Counts: The Feelings of Overwhelmed

Literature Counts: The Feelings of <i>Overwhelmed</i>

Review

Review

"intricate, overlapped, interweaved, and endless": Emerson, Henry James, and the Nature of Moral Life

This essay suggests that emphasis on the stylistic difference between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James obscures a radical kinship that exists not only in their perception of moral life but also in the way the texture of their writing expresses this perception. Accordingly, this essay is a prolegomena to a study of how James's prose—in particular the late Jamesian sentence—does what an Emerson essay does: shows the way "Our life is consentaneous and far-related," that "relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always"; shows, in effect, the nature of moral life.

At the dawn of environmentalism: nature and human in the philosophy of R. W. Emerson

The subject of this research is the philosophy of nature of Ralph Waldo Emerson as one of the reputable sources of modern environmentalism. The object of this research is the philosophy and body of texts of the American transcendentalism. The authors examine the aspects of Emerson's natural philosophy, due to which his outlook upon nature became in demand by such reputable areas of modern thought as deep ecology, ecocriticism, and environmental ethics. Special attention is turned to the analysis of Emerson's essay &amp;ldquo;The Nature&amp;rdquo; that follows an ecocritical narrative, as well as historical origins and philosophical contexts of Emerson's anthropocentrism and values of environmental ethics. Analysis of paramount for the founder of American transcendentalism analogy of nature and man allows concluding that the used by Emerson weak version of anthropocentrism does not exclude holistic approach towards man as part of the natural world, and contains an ecological impulse that allows interpreting nature as a complex environment requiring different descriptive languages. The proposed by Emerson interpretation of nature as a &amp;ldquo;symbol of spirit&amp;rdquo;, realized through convenience, beauty, language and discipline, contains the anticipation of values of environmental ethics and allows seeing an apologist for ecosophy in the &amp;ldquo;Concord wiseman&amp;rdquo;.The authors&amp;rsquo; special contribution consists in actualization of natural philosophy of R. W. Emerson as one of the reputable sources of environmentalism and consideration of his interpretation of human &amp;ndash; nature relationship as a constructive components of the currently relevant environmental values. The scientific novelty consists in examination of Emerson&amp;rsquo;s ideas in the context of the ideas of ecocriticism and deep ecology, as well as in thematicization of the analogy of nature and man through the prism of environmental ethics.

The Education of Ellen Tucker Emerson

This essay argues that examining choices Lidian Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, along with their daughter Ellen Tucker Emerson, made regarding Ellen's education provides insight into the family's domestic life and helps explain Ellen's work on Ralph Waldo Emerson's later essays, as he suffered from memory loss.

Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson

Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson

Stevens's Emerson: Kinds of Evidence

Stevens's Emerson:Kinds of Evidence Glen Macleod SCHOLARS GENERALLY AGREE that Wallace Stevens was deeply influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Rachel Malkin's words, "Stevens's Emersonianism is by now widely conceded" (224). We assume that Stevens was closely familiar with Emerson's poetry and essays. Dan O'Hara remarks, "It is well known that Stevens read Emerson at Harvard and after" (65). Richard Poirier asserts that Stevens undertook "an early and obviously intense reading of the essays" (Renewal 25). Harold Bloom simply states that "Stevens read Emerson early and fully" (Wallace Stevens 10). And yet, as Patrick Redding shows in his essay for this special issue, there is little documentary evidence to support these assumptions. Stevens's two brief—and only—mentions of Emerson, in the Letters of Wallace Stevens, are insignificant.1 The character Mr. Homburg of Concord in "Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly" may or may not refer to Emerson; in any case, Stevens's attitude toward this figure is deeply ambivalent (see Cook 288). More significant is the twelve-volume set of Emerson's Works that Stevens's mother gave him when he was a student at Harvard. We know that Stevens made notes and markings in a number of these books (Bates, "Stevens' Books" 51). Perhaps that factual evidence has seemed sufficient to certify that Stevens had broad knowledge of Emerson. But Redding points out that the large majority of pages in these volumes remain unmarked, and that the pages were even, in some places, uncut: Stevens "left untouched such canonical essays as 'Self-Reliance,' 'Circles,' and 'The Over-Soul.'" There is no record of his reading them at all. Starting from that recognition, Redding asks what conclusions we can draw if we limit our investigation to those passages from Emerson that Stevens actually marked or annotated. His approach uncovers a previously unremarked pattern in which Stevens works out his own attitude toward history in dialogue with Emerson. Redding's essay is a salutary reminder that our sense of Emerson's central importance to Stevens derives less from verifiable facts than from circumstantial and intertextual evidence. Bearing in mind that proviso, however, I think that in the case of Emerson such evidence remains [End Page 1] convincing. In the late nineteenth century, Emerson (1803–1882) was so well known and beloved in America that his essays and poems were a common feature of middle-class households. The young Wallace Stevens might well have read Emerson at home or in high school. We know that he studied Emerson at Harvard in the spring of 1900 as part of "English 5: Composition and Literature—Studies in Modern English Prose" (L 33). In any case, at the turn of the century, any literary Harvard student—and particularly an aspiring writer—would have been well versed in Emerson. The most persuasive indication of Emerson's influence on Stevens is the frequency of Emersonian echoes in his prose and poetry. My own experience is probably similar to that of other readers of The Wallace Stevens Journal. For years, I taught a variety of Emerson's essays in a year-long American literature survey course. As a Stevensian, I was constantly struck by what seemed, anachronistically, echoes of Stevens in those essays. For one thing, in a general way, the experience of reading Emerson's "Nature" or "Self-Reliance" seems to me very similar to the experience of reading Stevens's essays in The Necessary Angel. In both cases, the prose style is dense and aphoristic, full of striking phrases and observations, but difficult to follow as a progressive argument. Reading Emerson's essays is also similar, in some ways, to reading Stevens's poetry. Milton Bates suggests that a note Stevens wrote in the margin of Emerson's "Compensation" might be applied to his own poetry: "Hirst, a member of English 5, said, in a lecture on this essay, that Emerson's sentences though apparently distinct and separate were like rays clustering about the single star of his thought" (Sur Plusieurs 12). The poet Susan Howe similarly finds that Stevens's later poems "all run together the way Emerson's essays do into a...

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

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...

Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance, by John Haydock

<i>Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance</i>, by John Haydock

Emersonian Moods, Peircean Sentiments, and Ellingtonian Tones

ABSTRACT This article is an exploration of certain central features of the affective dimension of human lives. It moves from a consideration of moods, especially as these feature into several of Emerson's essays, to a consideration of sentiments, as they are treated by Peirce, and concludes with tones. At the center of this article, there is an attempt to bring into focus some of the most important connections among moods, sentiments, and tones. The ephemeral and variable character of moods is contrasted to the abiding and integrated character of sentiments in Peirce's sense. The article concludes with a discussion of tone in general and its bearing on democracy in particular. The topic of tone is first examined in light of James's “The Social Value of the College-Bred” and, then, in that of Duke Ellington's musical experiments in hitting upon the right sound, including the right tone. This is an ongoing experimental and improvisatory process in which “mistakes” are taken up and incorporated into the flow of the music or some other endeavor. “By their tone,” James insisted, “are all things human either lost or saved.” This text is dedicated to showing the contemporary relevance of James's claim.

Han Shan's Transparent Eyeball: The Asian Roots of American Eco-poetry

Han Shan's Transparent Eyeball:The Asian Roots of American Eco-poetry Translated by Tony Barnstone (bio) In 1984, I was twenty-three years old, the sort of man that the hermit-poet and irascible social critic Han Shan1 (c. 700–800 ce) would have described in this way: A graceful and handsome young man,well-versed in canons and histories,everyone calls him a teacher,or addresses him as a scholar,but he fails to get an official post,and doesn't know how to use a plow.He wears only a shabby gown in winter,totally ruined by books. (Barnstone 2005, 202) I was ruined by books, using my college degree in literature to do data entry, temp work, window-washing in Silicon Valley, even working in a granola factory in Santa Cruz, California, which I know sounds like it must be a joke. Yet the books that had ruined me also landed me my first teaching job, at the Beijing Foreign Studies Institute, in a China that was testing out how much it wanted to open up to Western culture and economic structures in the period following the death of Mao Zedong. A Tangle of Roots Though I was barely older than my students, I found myself teaching American and British literature, as well as English language and conversation, and I loved it. Partway through the first term, one of my best students in the language class, a young woman deeply interested in our conversations about life in America versus life in China, asked me a question that set me back on my heels a bit: "Professor Barnstone, we have heard this word 'individualism,' but we don't know what it means. Can you tell us?" If I had known more at the time, I would have talked about the Chinese tradition of individualism, about the celebration of creative innovation in Chinese ars poeticas, and about the way in which Daoism provided an outlet [End Page xiii] for eccentrics and nonconformists who didn't fit into Confucian social and familial structures. I might have quoted the Chinese sayings "You can't build a house inside a house" or "If you follow someone, you will always be behind" (Barnstone 1996, 48). But, as I recall, I answered the question by discussing Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance." Not long after, this student ceased coming to class. I wondered why, but didn't know until I chanced to meet her in the hallway between classes. I stopped her and cried, "What happened to you? Where did you go? You seemed to like the class so much." "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Tony," she whispered hurriedly. "I asked too many questions in your class. Someone has denounced me to the Party. I can't be seen talking to you." And she rushed off, ducking her head. It was a different China then than it is now, one where the nail that sticks up was more likely to get hammered down, where individuated clothes and hairstyles were still politically dangerous to wear, and where asking the wrong question could bring the weight of the Party down upon you. It saddened me. Decades later, this story still saddens me. It does so because this young student suffered for evincing an interest in what a later political campaign would call "spiritual pollution" coming from the West. And yet, this tradition of individual idealism is also deeply rooted in her own Chinese culture. In fact, it emerges in the West in part because of the influence of Eastern religious and philosophical thought. Like people, ideas travel. And they emigrate. And they take root. And they change. And some part of them remains connected to their homeland. "But what does all of this have to do with eco-poetry?" you could ask. I would assert that modern and contemporary American eco-poetry sprouts directly from the American Transcendentalist tradition of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others.2 These authors were deeply concerned with questions of how the poetic life is connected to the natural life; how to live with what today we would call a small carbon footprint...

Transatlantic Intersections: The Role of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the Dissemination of Blakean Thought into the Poetry of Walt Whitman

Whitman quoted no one in his poetry, at least not directly, as Matt Miller convincingly mgues in Collage of Myself However, Whitman was not above making use of the work of other writers in his poetry. It is through Whitman's early reading in conjunction with his collage approach to composition that he came to create Leaves of Grass as something which appears wholly original, but which resonates with so many echoes. It is often argued that Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important influences on Whitman 's Leaves of Grass. The extent and significance of Emerson 's influence has been a subject of inquiry' since the advent of Whitman scholarship. This text will focus on Emerson's essays and lectures as the main influences on Whitman which can be read as providing a mediating influence between Blake and Whitman.

In Memory Virginia N. Gordon December 13, 1927 to November 21, 2017

In Memory Virginia N. Gordon December 13, 1927 to November 21, 2017

Herman Melville and the Emergence of Trumpism

Herman Melville and the Emergence of Trumpism James Noel, Chair Click for larger view View full resolution Participants in the "Herman Melville and the Emergence of Trumpism" panel at ALA 2018, from left to right: James Noel, Caitlin Smith Oyekole, Madison Furrh, Nathan Wolff, and David Blake. Photo courtesy of Meredith Farmer. In 2011, both Seth Meyers and President Barack Obama made several jokes about Donald Trump during the White House Correspondents' Dinner. From his involvement in the Miss USA pageant and reality television to his fragile relationship with communities of color, no area from Trump's brash and ostentatious lifestyle was off-limits that evening. However, by November 8, 2016, the concerns that the former president and Meyers satirized had become part of the reason that Trump had become the next president of the United States. Trump-ism is a term coined to capture the emergence of the radical branch of Republicanism responsible for Trump's unorthodox journey to the White House. Given the relevance of American political values in Herman Melville's major works, this panel sought to investigate whether Melville's publications could illuminate [End Page 145] some of the enduring issues that fueled Trump's presidency. Does his art speak to current discussions concerning America's polarizing landscape? Caitlin Smith Oyekole, Madison Furrh, David Blake, and Nathan Wolff eloquently answer this question, revealing some of the harrowing ways that Melville's publications capture fundamental aspects of what has been termed Trumpism. Trumpism and the Know-Nothing Party Madison Furrh Colorado State University-Pueblo The Know-Nothing Party—a radicalized, nativist, anti-Catholic wing of the disintegrated Whig Party—won a series of victories during the 1854 elections, but nowhere was the Know-Nothing ticket more successful than in Massachusetts, Melville's home state. In Melville's "The Piazza," the narrator and the unfortunate Marianna converse in the Berkshire Mountains on a host of topics, including her complete isolation, her orphan status, her seventeen-year-old brother who worked himself to death, her "dull woman's work," the sorry state of her cabin, and the narrator's attempts to assuage her suffering through romantic suggestions of nature as medicinal. Near the end of the conversation, the poor orphan echoes the philosopher Socrates, saying, "Is it that I live so lonesome, and know nothing?" The affluent narrator responds with the slogan of the Know-Nothing Party: "I, too, know nothing, and therefore cannot answer." Ultimately, socio-political divisions that define the tale become foregrounded and our Know-Nothing narrator's predilections for the Picturesque, Romanticism, and Transcendentalism make him vulnerable to sensational politics, conspiracy theories and, ultimately, social nihilism. I analyze how Know-Nothingism functions in Melville's "The Piazza" (I believe I am the first to do so) and address "Benito Cereno" as another text depicting Know-Nothingism. Both tales demonstrate how Know-Nothing ideology cherishes ignorance, depends on stereotype and racism, and puts the entire American experiment at risk. Indeed, the narrator's fantastical imaginings result in (as Melville later wrote in his copy of Emerson's Essays: Second Series) "gross and astonishing errors & illusions," while promoting social "blindness [that] proceeds from a defect in the region of the heart." "Crippled America": Trump, Ahab, and the Materialist Turn Nathan Wolff Tufts University In a series of recent roundtables, scholars have undertaken an important project: situating Melville in the context of an expanding "materialist turn" in the literary humanities. Panelists proposed that we attend to the radical [End Page 146] imbrication of the human and nonhuman in Melville's work—a corrective to a false view of humans in general, and the captain of the Pequod in particular, as autonomous agents. Positioned as a strong-willed dictator by "Cold War" critics, Ahab becomes newly visible as a permeable, fragile, "leaky," figure. My paper sounds a cautionary note for this otherwise generative approach. By positing an opposition between Ahab as dictator and Ahab as a subject marked by weakness and instability, such readings threaten to obscure a lesson we twenty-first-century citizens learn with each news cycle: that fragility and tyranny go hand-in-hand. This is so both because Donald Trump's cruelty is manifestly rooted...

Picturing Thoreau: Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture

Picturing Thoreau: Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture

A Backward Glance over Some Leading Citizens in the Poe World

Having grown up, academically speaking, in the shadow of Arthur Hobson Quinn, who lived roughly half an hour from my college, Ursinus, and with so many of my college teachers having studied their American literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where Quinn was supreme when American literature was still a fairly new subject in university instruction, and now with myself looking like I might well be a contemporary of Quinn, or even Poe and John Greenleaf Whittier, and being from a family in which genealogy was important, it may be natural that I should represent historical memory and share my recollections of some persons who pioneered in and opened up Poe studies. Some may be surprised to learn that Professor Quinn was, first and foremost, not a Poe specialist, but that his preeminent scholarly love was American drama. For pre-twentieth-century American plays, Quinn’s studies typically remain, after nearly a century, almost the only informed commentaries. Many have become increasingly aware that William Dunlap, America’s first major playwright, and the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, might each properly be deemed the Adam to American literary Gothicism. To return to Professor Quinn: when I began my own academic studies, he was in his eighties, ill, and housebound. He spent most of his time nestled in a chair, swathed in blankets and quilts, and wearing a sun shade, claiming that reading so many early American plays had ruined his eyesight. Before such ills befell him, Quinn was active in having established the Clothier Collection of American Drama at the University of Pennsylvania, which remains one of the foremost collections of early American plays. The Poe interest emerged from Quinn’s own work in American drama—Poe’s parents being actors—and from his aim to furnish an accurate biographical portraiture of Poe which would demolish the long-standing depiction by Rufus Griswold. Spending more than twenty years in preparing that biography, which appeared first in 1941 but has stood the test of time well enough to go through several reprintings, Quinn achieved a solid narrative account, though many of his critical opinions have been modified or superseded in the work of others. A Quinn student, J. Albert Robbins, followed his mentor’s practices in determining to present factually accurate scholarship, as some early volumes in the American Literary Scholarship journal attest. Robbins often recounted to me anecdotes of his days as Quinn’s student. Those who know Quinn primarily for

Influence of the Bhagavad Gita on R.W. Emerson's essay "The Transcendentalist". Uplifting the philosophy of Immanuel Kant to its highest level by R.W. Emerson

Influence of the Bhagavad Gita on R.W. Emerson's essay "The Transcendentalist". Uplifting the philosophy of Immanuel Kant to its highest level by R.W. Emerson

Emerson-Exemplar: Friedrich Nietzsche's Emerson Marginalia: Introduction

ABSTRACT Nietzsche once remarked of Emerson's Essays, “never have I felt so much at home in a book.” Indeed, throughout his intellectual life, Nietzsche returned to Emerson more than any other author. This text is a presentation, for the first time in English, of Nietzsche's Emerson marginalia of 1881, along with those passages that he copied, with variations and abridgments, from Emerson's Versuche (Essays) into a separate notebook in January 1882. For context, I have included in my notes brief passages from the German translation alongside Emerson's original that bear the most direct relevance to the texts here presented. Often these are passages Nietzsche himself underlined. With particular attention to the German translation Nietzsche was reading, I demonstrate in my introduction critical ways in which Emerson provoked Nietzsche's thought, and articulate what I take to be the basis of Nietzsche's deep and abiding affinity with the American thinker.

Historical Sense as Vice and Virtue in Nietzsche's Reading of Emerson

ABSTRACT Nietzsche was an avid reader of Emerson's essays, and their influence is discernible from his earliest philosophical writings through to his final philosophical works. Nietzsche's copies of Emerson's books are covered with traces of his reading, from underlinings, exclamation marks, question marks, and dog-eared pages to numerous annotations and philosophical comments written in the margins. I use some of these to analyze the influence Emerson exerted on Nietzsche's conception of history and historiography. The two authors can be considered “twin souls” in that they both praised the strengthening effects of past greatness and, at the same time, opposed psychological subjugation or fanaticism. Nevertheless, they were not twin minds: Nietzsche rejected Emerson's metaphysical concept of an Oversoul and turned it into the ideal of a Dionysian soul, which aims at reliving the history of humanity in order to increase its power.