Emerson's Transcendental Etudes

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by Stanley Cavell,

Edited by David Justin Hodge

Stanford University Press

Due/Published October 2003, 362 pages, paper

ISBN 0804745439

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effort of that labor is drawn together here for the first time into a single volume, which also contains two previously unpublished essays and an introduction by Cavell that reflects on this book and the history of its emergence.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 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.

Series: Cultural Memory in the Present

"No one has come closer than Stanley Cavell to engaging Emerson's work in such a way as simultaneously to illuminate and to rival its unique subtlety, boldness, and penetration. This long-awaited collection of new and previously-published essays will ensure Cavell's continuing influence on serious students of American literature and thought for many years to come."--Lawrence Buell, author of Literary Transcendentalism, New England Literary Culture, and Emerson

Review

For more than thirty years, Stanley Cavell has been thinking and writing about Ralph Waldo Emerson. At times, Cavell has had to justify his intense interest in and appreciation of Emerson. While many of Cavell’s colleagues acknowledge Emerson’s contributions to American intellectual life and his prowess as a thinker, they are suspicious of Emerson as philosopher. However, as these essays show, Cavell has long considered Emerson to be a complex philosopher, whose ideas and influence are an integral aspect of the Western philosophical tradition. In these remarkable essays from the past thirty, we find one philosopher (Cavell) grappling with and even marveling in the richness, boldness, and difficulties of another (Emerson).

Essays include: “The Philosopher in American Life (toward Thoreau and Emerson,” “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant (Terms as Conditions),” “Being Odd Getting Even (Descartes, Emerson, Poet), “Aversive Thinking: Emersonian Representations in Heidegger and Nietzsche,” “Emerson’s Constitutional Amending: Reading ‘Fate,’” “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” “Henry James Reading Emerson Reading Shakespeare”

Lawrence Buell writes, “No one has come closer that Stanley Cavell to engaging Emerson’s work in such a way as simultaneously to illuminate and to rival its unique subtlety, boldness, and penetration. This long-awaited collection of new and previously published essays will ensure Cavell’s continuing on influence on American literature and thought for many years to come.”