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
Less Legible Meanings: Between Poetry and Philosophy in the Work of Emerson

Less Legible Meanings: Between Poetry and Philosophy in the Work of Emerson

Schirmeister, Pamela J.

Hardcover

Letters & EssaysLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 0804730156
ISBN13: 9780804730150
Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr
Published: Jan 1 2000
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.94
Height: 1.08 Width: 5.99 Depth: 8.84
Language: English

Examining 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.

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