Emerson and the Climates of History

Emerson and the Climates of History PDF Author: Eduardo Cadava
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804728140
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book brings together a wide range of materials from history, religion, philosophy, horticulture, and meteorology to argue that Emerson articulates his conception of history through the language of the weather. Focusing on Emerson's persistent use of climatic and meteorological metaphors, the book demonstrates that Emerson's reflections on the weather are inseparable from his preoccupation with the central historical and political issues of his day. The author suggests that Emerson's writings may be read as both symptomatic and critical of the governing rhetorics through which Americans of his day thought about the most important contemporary issues, and that what has often been seen as Emerson's retreat from the arena of history into the domain of spirit is in fact an effort to re-treat or rethink the nature of history in terms of questions of representation. What distinguishes this book from the work of other critics who are reassessing Emerson's relation to history is its attempt to think through the way in which the figures of Emerson's rhetoric—figures (like frost, snow, the auroras, and nature in general) which often seem to have nothing to do with either history or politics—are themselves traversed by the conflictual histories of slavery, race, destiny, revolution, and the meaning of America. It differs, that is, in proposing a textual model for reading Emerson that measures his engagement with changing historical and political relations in terms of the way he works to revise the language he inherits. There can be no reading of Emerson, the author suggests, that does not trace the movement of his figures and tropes as they become something else, as they open onto questions of history.

Emerson and the Climates of History

Emerson and the Climates of History PDF Author: Eduardo Cadava
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804728140
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book brings together a wide range of materials from history, religion, philosophy, horticulture, and meteorology to argue that Emerson articulates his conception of history through the language of the weather. Focusing on Emerson's persistent use of climatic and meteorological metaphors, the book demonstrates that Emerson's reflections on the weather are inseparable from his preoccupation with the central historical and political issues of his day. The author suggests that Emerson's writings may be read as both symptomatic and critical of the governing rhetorics through which Americans of his day thought about the most important contemporary issues, and that what has often been seen as Emerson's retreat from the arena of history into the domain of spirit is in fact an effort to re-treat or rethink the nature of history in terms of questions of representation. What distinguishes this book from the work of other critics who are reassessing Emerson's relation to history is its attempt to think through the way in which the figures of Emerson's rhetoric—figures (like frost, snow, the auroras, and nature in general) which often seem to have nothing to do with either history or politics—are themselves traversed by the conflictual histories of slavery, race, destiny, revolution, and the meaning of America. It differs, that is, in proposing a textual model for reading Emerson that measures his engagement with changing historical and political relations in terms of the way he works to revise the language he inherits. There can be no reading of Emerson, the author suggests, that does not trace the movement of his figures and tropes as they become something else, as they open onto questions of history.

Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor

Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor PDF Author: David LaRocca
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 144117561X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Metaphors are ubiquitous and yet-or, for that very reason-go largely unseen. We are all variously susceptible to a blindness or blurry vision of metaphors; yet even when they are seen clearly, we are left to situate the ambiguities, conflations and contradictions they regularly present-logically, aesthetically and morally. David LaRocca's book serves as a set of 'reminders' of certain features of the natural history of our language-especially the tropes that permeate and define it. As part of his investigation, LaRocca turns to Ralph Waldo Emerson's only book on a single topic, English Traits (1856), which teems with genealogical and generative metaphors-blood, birth, plants, parents, family, names and race. In the first book-length study of English Traits in over half a century, LaRocca considers the presence of metaphors in Emerson's fertile text-a unique work in his expansive corpus, and one that is regularly overlooked. As metaphors are encountered in Emerson's book, and drawn from a long history of usage in work by others, a reader may realize (or remember) what is inherent and encoded in our language, but rarely seen: how metaphors circulate in speech and through texts to become the lifeblood of thought.

Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism

Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism PDF Author: Phyllis Cole
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195152005
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Mary Moody Emerson has long been a New England legend, the "eccentric Calvinist aunt" of Ralph Waldo Emerson, wearing a death-shroud as her daily garment. This exciting new study, based on the first reading of all her known letters and diaries, reveals a complex human voice and powerful forerunner of American Transcendentalism. From the years of her famous nephew's infancy, in both private and published writings, she celebrated independence, solitude in nature, and inward communion with God. Mary Moody Emerson inherited both resources and constraints from her family, a lineage of Massachusetts ministers who had earlier practiced spiritual awakening and political resistance against England. Cole discovers a previously unexamined Emerson tradition of fervent piety in the ancestors' own writing and Mary's preservation of their memory. She also examines the position of a woman in this patriarchal family. Barred from the pulpit and university by her sex, she also refused marriage to become a reader, writer, and religious seeker. Cole's biography explores this reading and writing as both a woman's vocation and a gift to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Helping to raise her nephews after their father's death, Mary Moody Emerson urged Waldo the college student to seek solitude in nature and become a divine poet. Cole's pioneering study, tracing crucial lines of influence from Mary Emerson's heretofore unknown texts to her nephew's major works, establishes a fresh and vital source for a central American literary tradition.

Natural History of Intellect

Natural History of Intellect PDF Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American essays
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description


Words of Light

Words of Light PDF Author: Eduardo Cadava
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691188718
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Here Eduardo Cadava demonstrates that Walter Benjamin articulates his conception of history through the language of photography. Focusing on Benjamin's discussions of the flashes and images of history, he argues that the questions raised by this link between photography and history touch on issues that belong to the entire trajectory of his writings: the historical and political consequences of technology, the relation between reproduction and mimesis, images and history, remembering and forgetting, allegory and mourning, and visual and linguistic representation. The book establishes the photographic constellation of motifs and themes around which Benjamin organizes his texts and thereby becomes a lens through which we can begin to view his analysis of the convergence between the new technological media and a revolutionary concept of historical action and understanding. Written in the form of theses--what Cadava calls "snapshots in prose"--the book memorializes Benjamin's own thetic method of writing. It enacts a mode of conceiving history that is neither linear nor successive, but rather discontinuous--constructed from what Benjamin calls "dialectical images." In this way, it not only suggests the essential rapport between the fragmentary form of Benjamin's writing and his effort to write a history of modernity but it also skillfully clarifies the relation between Benjamin and his contemporaries, the relation between fascism and aesthetic ideology. It gives us the most complete picture to date of Benjamin's reflections on history.

The Future History of the Arctic

The Future History of the Arctic PDF Author: Charles Emmerson
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 0786746246
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
Long at the margins of global affairs and at the edge of our mental map of the world, the Arctic has found its way to the center of the issues which will challenge and define our world in the twenty-first century: energy security and the struggle for natural resources, climate change and its uncertain speed and consequences, the return of great power competition, the remaking of global trade patterns In The Future History of the Arctic, geopolitics expert Charles Emmerson weaves together the history of the region with reportage and reflection, revealing a vast and complex area of the globe, loaded with opportunity and rich in challenges. He defines the forces which have shaped the Arctic's history and introduces the players in politics, business, science and society who are struggling to mold its future. The Arctic is coming of age. This engrossing book tells the story of how that is happening and how it might happen -- through the stories of those who live there, those who study it, and those who will determine its destiny.

Emerson's Life in Science

Emerson's Life in Science PDF Author: Laura Dassow Walls
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717391
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Ralph Waldo Emerson has traditionally been cast as a dreamer and a mystic, concerned with the ideals of transcendentalism rather than the realities of contemporary science and technology. In Laura Dassow Walls's view Emerson was a leader of the secular avant-garde in his day. He helped to establish science as the popular norm of truth in America and to modernize American popular thought. In addition, he became a hero to a post-Darwinian generation of Victorian Dissenters, exemplifying the strong connection between transcendentalism and later nineteenth-century science.In his early years as a minister, Emerson read widely in natural philosophy (or physics), chemistry, geology, botany, and comparative anatomy. When he left the church, it was to seek the truths written in the book of nature rather than in books of scripture. While visiting the Paris Museum of Natural History during his first European tour, Emerson experienced a revelation so intense that he declared, "I will be a naturalist." Once he was back in the United States, his first step in realizing this ambition was to deliver a series of lectures on natural science. These lectures formed the basis for his first publication, Nature (1836), and his writings ever after reflected his intense and continuing interest in science.Walls finds that Emerson matured just as the concept of "the two cultures" emerged, when the disciplines of literature and science were divorcing each other even as he called repeatedly for their marriage. Consequently, Walls writes, half of Emerson's thought has been invisible to us: science was central to Emerson, to his language, to the basic organization of his career. In Emerson's Life in Science, she makes the case that no study of literary history can be complete without embracing science as part of literature. Conversely, she maintains, no history of science is complete unless we consider the role played by writers of literature who helped to install science in the popular imagination.

Listening on All Sides

Listening on All Sides PDF Author: Richard Deming
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804757386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Bringing together Continental literary theory and Anglo-American philosophy, Listening on All Sides reads the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams to uncover the role literary texts play in the way that language use creates and defines culture and ethics.

Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes

Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes PDF Author: Stanley Cavell
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804745437
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This book is Stanley Cavell’s definitive expression on Emerson. Over the past thirty years, Cavell has demonstrated that he is the most emphatic and provocative philosophical critic of Emerson that America has yet known. The sustained effort of that labor is drawn together here for the first time into a single volume, which also contains two previously unpublished essays and an introduction by Cavell that reflects on this book and the history of its emergence. Students and scholars working in philosophy, literature, American studies, history, film studies, and political theory can now more easily access Cavell’s luminous and enduring work on Emerson. Such engagement should be further complemented by extensive indices and annotations. If we are still in doubt whether America has expressed itself philosophically, there is perhaps no better space for inquiry than reading Cavell reading Emerson.

American Pioneers and Patriots

American Pioneers and Patriots PDF Author: Caroline Emerson
Publisher: Christian Liberty Press
ISBN: 9781932971514
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
American Pioneers & Patriots will allow your 3rd and 4th grade students to explore America's past through the fictional accounts of typical pioneer families. Young patriots of today will gain an appreciation of the courage it took to build this great nation of ours!