Pamela Schirmeister's Books

The Consolations of Space

The Place of Romance in Hawthorne, Melville, and James

By: Pamela Schirmeister

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The Consolations of Space

The Place of Romance in Hawthorne, Melville, and James

By: Pamela Schirmeister

Unlike studies that detail how American writers have responded to the physical American landscape, this book takes its point of departure from the peculiarities of romance as American writers have understood it. Romance has always been tied to place, but not to literal or regional place: even when the topography of romance is represented as a place to which one might actually go. it is always, as Coleridge remarked of Spenser's Faeryland, a mental landscape. that landscape is, by its very nature, visionary, so that its details necessarily constitute a trope of perspective. It is the space the writer creates, in which he or she stands so as to see things better, under those particular lights and shadows that make romance possible. Other writers have and have not been there before. While the spaces of romance create the writer's perspective - trope the very writing of romance - they contain complex allusions to poetic forebears. Thus this book also explores the function of literary allusion in American romance, especially in the nineteenth century.

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254

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804717931

ISBN 13

9780804717939

Less Legible Meanings

Between Poetry and Philosophy in the Work of Emerson

By: Pamela J. Schirmeister

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Less Legible Meanings

Between Poetry and Philosophy in the Work of Emerson

By: Pamela J. Schirmeister

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. After situating American letters in relation to German and British Romanticism and the features of American culture that augmented and altered their reception in the United States, the book goes on to explore the type of reading that Emersonian rhetoric engenders. Both persuasive and tropological, this rhetoric elicits from the reader something similar to psychoanalytic transference. Its goal is to lead the reader to a point at which representational logic breaks down so that a new subject can take shape. The purpose of such rhetoric, however, extends well beyond personal self-creation, because the construction of the subject emerges as the very possibility of the passage from the private sphere to the public one. In this passage, our entire notion of liberal individualism must be rethought, and with it, the pragmatic question of Emersonian ethics and politics. A revisionary study of some of Emerson's central essays, Less Legible Meanings also invites the reader to reconsider the nature of Emerson's influence on contemporary American culture and to discover new ways in which we might continue to understand his work. Interdisciplinary in scope, the book makes equal use of the history of philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural history.

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275

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Stanford University Press

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ISBN 10

0804780129

ISBN 13

9780804780124

The Consolations of Space

The Place of Romance in Hawthorne, Melville, and James

By: Pamela Schirmeister

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The Consolations of Space

The Place of Romance in Hawthorne, Melville, and James

By: Pamela Schirmeister

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

254

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804717931

ISBN 13

9780804717939

Book's by Pamela Schirmeister

The Consolations of Space

The Consolations of Space

Less Legible Meanings

Less Legible Meanings

The Consolations of Space

The Consolations of Space

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