Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Impersonality: Seven Essays

Impersonality: Seven Essays

Cameron, Sharon

Paperback

Letters & EssaysLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 0226091325
ISBN13: 9780226091327
Publisher: Univ Of Chicago Pr
Published: Feb 15 2007
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.28 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. Sharon Cameron ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and figures of international modernism-writers for whom personal identity is inconsequential and even imaginary. In essays on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, Cameron examines the impulse to hollow out the core of human distinctiveness, to construct a voice that is no one's voice, to fashion a character without meaningful attributes, a being that is virtually anonymous.

To consent to being anonymous, Weil wrote, is to bear witness to the truth. But how is this compatible with social life and its labels? Throughout these essays Cameron examines the friction, even violence, set in motion from such incompatibility-from a truth that has no social foundation. Impersonality investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, and even destroys the person as a social, political, or individual entity, of writing that engages with personal identity at the moment when its usual markers vanish or dissolve.

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