American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron

American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron PDF Author: Branka Arsic
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623567718
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
American Impersonal brings together some of the most influential scholars now working in American literature to explore the impact of one of America's leading literary critics: Sharon Cameron. It engages directly with certain arguments that Cameron has articulated throughout her career, most notably her late work on the question of impersonality. In doing so, it provides responses to questions fundamental to literary criticism, such as: the nature of personhood; the logic of subjectivity in depersonalized communities; the question of the human within the problematic of the impersonal; how impersonality relates to the “posthuman.” Additionally, some essays respond to the current “aesthetic turn” in literary scholarship and engage with the lyric, currently much debated, as well as the larger questions of poetics and the logic of genre. These crucial issues are addressed from the perspective of an American literary and philosophical tradition, and progress chronologically, starting from Melville and Emerson and moving via Dickinson, Thoreau and Hawthorne to Henry James and Wallace Stevens. This historical perspective adds the appeal of revisiting the American nineteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition, and even rewriting it.

American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron

American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron PDF Author: Branka Arsic
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623567718
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book Here

Book Description
American Impersonal brings together some of the most influential scholars now working in American literature to explore the impact of one of America's leading literary critics: Sharon Cameron. It engages directly with certain arguments that Cameron has articulated throughout her career, most notably her late work on the question of impersonality. In doing so, it provides responses to questions fundamental to literary criticism, such as: the nature of personhood; the logic of subjectivity in depersonalized communities; the question of the human within the problematic of the impersonal; how impersonality relates to the “posthuman.” Additionally, some essays respond to the current “aesthetic turn” in literary scholarship and engage with the lyric, currently much debated, as well as the larger questions of poetics and the logic of genre. These crucial issues are addressed from the perspective of an American literary and philosophical tradition, and progress chronologically, starting from Melville and Emerson and moving via Dickinson, Thoreau and Hawthorne to Henry James and Wallace Stevens. This historical perspective adds the appeal of revisiting the American nineteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition, and even rewriting it.

The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson PDF Author: Christopher Hanlon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192647083
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most expansive collection of critical essays on Emerson to date, a survey that approaches Emerson from the vantages of climate change, racial justice, print culture, the digital humanities, the new religious studies, hemispheric American Studies, health humanities, and affect theory among other critical perspectives. Curated between a forward by editor Christopher Hanlon--who makes the case for a capacious and contemporary Emerson--and Cornel West--the activist-scholar whose influential work on Emerson merges with a career of advocacy for economic and racial justice?this collection assesses the history and state of Emerson scholarship while charting pathways for new work on this most essential American writer. Comprised of new works by leading figures in nineteenth-century Americanist literary studies, the volume suggests directions into underexamined facets of Emerson's writing, life, and reputation. From Emerson's engagements with energy infrastructure and the processes of extraction that undergirded the locomotives he rode and the energy economies he sometimes extolled; to the vicissitudes of age he experienced alongside the romantic tropes of youthful vigour he both re-circulated and re-tooled; to Emerson's poetry, both in its philosophical formulations and in its reflections of the material circumstances of nineteenth-century print culture; to Emerson's resonance beyond the United States, elsewhere in the western hemisphere; to the Black press and its refractions of Emersonian transcendentalism in the midst of ante- and post-bellum justice struggles; to the legacies of Emerson to be found in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Rachel Carson, and in the versions of ?Emerson? to be found in children's literature; to his often-fraught and often-fruitful engagements with reform movements of various sorts; to the prospects for digital processes of re-reading Emerson and his contemporaries' styles of textual production and engagement, The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson is a necessary resource for students, scholars, and general readers committed to the study of Emerson, transcendentalism, and current critical approaches to United States literature.

Xenocitizens

Xenocitizens PDF Author: Jason Berger
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823287769
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
In Xenocitizens, Jason Berger returns to the antebellum United States in order to challenge a scholarly tradition based on liberal–humanist perspectives. Through the concept of the xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms “xeno,” which connotes alien or stranger, and “citizen,” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, Berger uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Innovatively re-orienting our thinking about traditional nineteenth-century figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as well as formative writers such as William Wells Brown, Martin R. Delany, Margaret Fuller, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Xenocitizens glimpses how antebellum thinkers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and crisis, startlingly unique ontological and social models as well as unfamiliar ways to exist and to leverage change. In doing so, Berger offers us a different nineteenth century—pushing our imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.

Excursions with Thoreau

Excursions with Thoreau PDF Author: Edward F. Mooney
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501305654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
"A literary and philosophical exploration of Thoreau as a prose-poet and religious adept who carries us into fresh and unexpected communion with landscape, seascape, open sky, and what he calls "the unfathomable.""--

The Plural of Us

The Plural of Us PDF Author: Bonnie Costello
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202907
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The Plural of Us is the first book to focus on the poet’s use of the first-person plural voice—poetry’s “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, Bonnie Costello uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying “I,” “we” has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, Costello explores the communal function of poetry—the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural. Costello adopts a taxonomic approach to her subject, considering “we” from its most constricted to its fully unbounded forms. She also takes a historical perspective, following Auden’s interest in the full range of “the human pluralities” in a time of particular pressure for and against the collective. Costello offers new readings as she tracks his changing approach to voice in democracy. Examples from many other poets—including Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens—arise throughout the book, and the final chapter offers a consideration of how contemporary writers find form for what George Oppen called “the meaning of being numerous.” Connecting insights to philosophy of language and to recent work in concepts of community, The Plural of Us shows how poetry raises vital questions—literary and social—about how we speak of our togetherness.

The New Melville Studies

The New Melville Studies PDF Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484034
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This collection reimagines Melville as both a theorist and a writer, approaching his works as philosophical forms in their own right.

Dispersion

Dispersion PDF Author: Branka Arsic
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501370596
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Plants are silent, still, or move slowly; we do not have the sense that they accompany us, or even perceive us. But is there something that plants are telling us? Is there something about how they live and connect, how they relate to the world and other plants that can teach us about ecological thinking, about ethics and politics? Grounded in Thoreau's ecology and in contemporary plant studies, Dispersion: Thoreau and Vegetal Thought offers answers to those questions by pondering such concepts as co-dependence, the continuity of life forms, relationality, cohabitation, porousness, fragility, the openness of beings to incessant modification by other beings and phenomena, patience, waiting, slowness and receptivity.

Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies

Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies PDF Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192871722
Category : Aesthetics in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
In this fascinating book, Cody Marrs retraces Melville's engagement with beauty and provides a revisionary account of Melville's philosophy, aesthetics, and literary career.

Nineteenth Century Prose

Nineteenth Century Prose PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description


Inheriting Stanley Cavell

Inheriting Stanley Cavell PDF Author: David LaRocca
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501358197
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Some of the people who knew Stanley Cavell best--or know his work most intimately--are gathered in Inheriting Stanley Cavell to lend critical insight into the once and future legacy of this American titan of thought. Former students, colleagues, long-time friends, as well as distant admirers, explore moments when their personal experiences of Cavell's singular philosophical and literary illuminations have, as he put it, “risen to the level of philosophical significance.” Many of the memories, dreams, and reflections on offer in this volume carry with them a welcome register of the autobiographical, expressing--much as Cavell did through his own writing--how the personal can become philosophical and thus provide a robust mode for the making of meaning and the clarifying of the human condition. Here, in varied styles and through a range of dynamic content, authors engage the lingering question of inheriting philosophy in whatever form it might take, and what it means to think about inheritance and enact it.