LEADER 04455nam 2200565 a 450 001 9910783048003321 005 20230422043136.0 010 $a0-8047-8012-9 024 7 $a10.1515/9780804780124 035 $a(CKB)1000000000004627 035 $a(OCoLC)70765886 035 $a(CaPaEBR)ebrary10015686 035 $a(SSID)ssj0000281383 035 $a(PQKBManifestationID)11211234 035 $a(PQKBTitleCode)TC0000281383 035 $a(PQKBWorkID)10306226 035 $a(PQKB)11632085 035 $a(MiAaPQ)EBC3037389 035 $a(Au-PeEL)EBL3037389 035 $a(CaPaEBR)ebr10015686 035 $a(DE-B1597)581758 035 $a(DE-B1597)9780804780124 035 $a(EXLCZ)991000000000004627 100 $a19990713d1999 uy 0 101 0 $aeng 135 $aurcn||||||||| 181 $ctxt 182 $cc 183 $acr 200 10$aLess legible meanings$b[electronic resource] $ebetween poetry and philosophy in the work of Emerson /$fPamela Schirmeister 210 $aStanford, Calif. $cStanford University Press$d1999 215 $a1 online resource (238 p.) 300 $aBibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph 311 0 $a0-8047-3015-6 320 $aIncludes bibliographical references (p. 212-217) and index. 327 $tFront matter --$tAcknowledgments --$tContents --$tIntroduction: The Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy --$tPart One. American Letters and Cultural Therapeutics --$t1. We Scholars --$tPart Two. The Emersonian Subject: Reading and Transference --$t2. From Philosophy to Rhetoric --$t3. Reading Transference --$tPart Three. Transfers of Reading: Toward an Emersonian Politics --$t4. Settling Accounts: "Experience" --$t5. From Exemplarity to Representativeness --$t6. Measures of Silence --$tNotes --$tWorks Cited --$tIndex 330 $aExamining both why and how Emerson evades the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy, this book entirely rethinks the nature of Emerson's radical individualism and its relation to the possibility of an ethics and a politics. The author argues that the quarrel between literature and philosophy never took place in America, and that instead traditional philosophical work staged itself here as a form of literary praxis and cultural therapeutics. Epitomized in the work of Emerson, this praxis takes shape explicitly in Emerson's understanding of democracy and occurs as an exchange within the act of reading. This is the exchange that Emerson so eloquently calls for in "The American Scholar" under the name of "letters." Emerson's project for American letters is the creation of a new national identity; as Less Legible Meanings makes clear, we have not yet understood the full range of implications that this project entails. After situating American letters in relation to German and British Romanticism and the features of American culture that augmented and altered their reception in the United States, the book goes on to explore the type of reading that Emersonian rhetoric engenders. Both persuasive and tropological, this rhetoric elicits from the reader something similar to psychoanalytic transference. Its goal is to lead the reader to a point at which representational logic breaks down so that a new subject can take shape. The purpose of such rhetoric, however, extends well beyond personal self-creation, because the construction of the subject emerges as the very possibility of the passage from the private sphere to the public one. In this passage, our entire notion of liberal individualism must be rethought, and with it, the pragmatic question of Emersonian ethics and politics. A revisionary study of some of Emerson's central essays, Less Legible Meanings also invites the reader to reconsider the nature of Emerson's influence on contemporary American culture and to discover new ways in which we might continue to understand his work. Interdisciplinary in scope, the book makes equal use of the history of philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural history. 606 $aPhilosophy, American$y19th century 606 $aPhilosophy in literature 615 0$aPhilosophy, American 615 0$aPhilosophy in literature. 676 $a814/.3 700 $aSchirmeister$b Pamela$f1958-$01577668 801 0$bMiAaPQ 801 1$bMiAaPQ 801 2$bMiAaPQ 906 $aBOOK 912 $a9910783048003321 996 $aLess legible meanings$93856483 997 $aUNINA