Representing revolution: Emerson and the language of higher law.
Item
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Title
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Representing revolution: Emerson and the language of higher law.
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Identifier
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AAI3008818
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identifier
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3008818
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Creator
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Darcy, Jean Kathleen.
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Contributor
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Adviser: William P. Kelly
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Date
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2001
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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Recent critics have contributed to the scholarship on Emerson by situating him within the historic circumstances in which he lived and wrote. I expand on this scholarship by situating Emerson's lyric voice within the communal space, on the bare common. Emerson uses transcendental language as a public language that bears witness to personal experience of the present moment. He calls this idealism in 1842. The public language used by ministers and politicians of the period to understand the crisis that brought the nation to the brink of war relies on an apocalyptic and gnostic understanding of providential history. This rhetoric seeks to both predict the future and provide the authority on which social compacts are based. Emerson's transcendental rhetoric opposes such a view of national vision and authority. Emerson claims that only the voice of the individual who bears witness to his experience in social spaces can recognize the relation between personal identity and higher laws, power and form. For Emerson this claim to personal voice is the beginning of social dialogue and circles of exchange that provide the basis for social cohesion.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
