A01=Michael J. Colacurcio
American literature
American philosophy
American pragmatists
Author_Michael J. Colacurcio
Category=DS
Category=QRAB
Christian Poetry
Christianity and Literature
Christianity and Poetry
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Ethics
Idealism
Post-Ethics
Practical Reason
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Romanticism
Product details
- ISBN 9781481311793
- Weight: 333g
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jan 2021
- Publisher: Baylor University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In Emerson and Other Minds, Michael J. Colacurcio traces the long arc of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings. While Emerson's seldom argues academically in his essays, he intends the essays to be primary acts of philosophy. The essays are also highly wrought literary performances, and so they need to be closely read in the New Critical manner.
Colacurcio proposes that Emerson is one of modernity's central writers on the question of ""privacy"": the unsettling epistemological fact that even though people have the ability to share through language the experiences that shape their version of the world, no one else can fully experience another's process of creating and evaluating the world. Emerson may imagine a transparent eyeball, but never a universal retina. This ineluctable privacy underwrites the famous moral doctrine of ""self-reliance,"" but it also helps to explain the painful problems of love and friendship.
Colacurcio's close reading results in a two-volume compilation that reminds us of the importance of encountering and remembering Emerson for more than his famous sentences. Conversing with himself and other powerful minds on fundamental questions of human knowledge and behavior, Emerson produced brilliant essays - both philosophical and literary in the fullest sense - that are certainly worth reading closely and with new eyes.
Colacurcio proposes that Emerson is one of modernity's central writers on the question of ""privacy"": the unsettling epistemological fact that even though people have the ability to share through language the experiences that shape their version of the world, no one else can fully experience another's process of creating and evaluating the world. Emerson may imagine a transparent eyeball, but never a universal retina. This ineluctable privacy underwrites the famous moral doctrine of ""self-reliance,"" but it also helps to explain the painful problems of love and friendship.
Colacurcio's close reading results in a two-volume compilation that reminds us of the importance of encountering and remembering Emerson for more than his famous sentences. Conversing with himself and other powerful minds on fundamental questions of human knowledge and behavior, Emerson produced brilliant essays - both philosophical and literary in the fullest sense - that are certainly worth reading closely and with new eyes.
Michael J. Colacurcio is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.
