American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron

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. FC Half title Title Copyright Contents Preface Introduction 1 Being Singularly Impersonal: Jonathan Edwards and the Aesthetics of Consent—James D. Lilley 2 Melville’s Creatures, or Seeing Otherwise—Colin Dayan 3 On Ecstasy: Sharon Cameron’s Reading of Emerson—Paul Grimstad 4 The Recognition of Emerson’s Impersonal: Reading Alternatives in Sharon Cameron—Johannes Voelz 5 On the Matter of Thinking: Margaret Fuller’s Beautiful Work—Vesna Kuiken 6 Thoreau’s Journal: Reading Nature—George Kateb 7 What Music Shall We Have? Thoreau on the Aesthetics and Politics of Listening—Branka Arsic 8 Hawthorne’s Fictional Commitments: The Early Tales—Kerry Larson 9 Hawthorne’s Rage: On Form and the Dharma—Theo Davis 10 Formal, New, and Relational Aesthetics: Dickinson’s Multitexts—Shira Wolosky 11 Beyond Sense: Portraits and Objects in Henry James’s Late Writings—Michael Moon 12 Believing in “Maud-Evelyn”: Henry James and the Obligation to Ghosts—Shari Goldberg 13 The Ends of Imagination: Stevens’s Impersonal—Mark Noble Contributors Index