Karin E. Gedge
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195130201
- eISBN:
- 9780199835157
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195130200.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
Nineteenth-century American readers regularly encountered powerful and paradoxical images of clergy and women in many fictive genres, a reflection of the cultural tensions manifested in the ...
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Nineteenth-century American readers regularly encountered powerful and paradoxical images of clergy and women in many fictive genres, a reflection of the cultural tensions manifested in the contemporary pastoral relationship. Sensational novelists such as George Lippard exposed the monstrous incongruity of the “reverend rake.” Sentimental novelist Susan Warner constructed a romantic clerical hero who was both benevolent and despotic in his relationship with the female protagonist, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s minister was impotent, dependent on the women who supported him. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s enduring Scarlet Letter portrayed the pastor as an unworthy saint and Hester Prynne as the worthy sinner. Even pious memoirs and parsonage novels acknowledged the intrusion of sexuality, “something peculiar and insidious” in Stowe’s words, which inevitably corrupted the spiritual relationship between pastors and women. Only transforming it into a marital relationship could, to some degree, resolve the inherent sexual tension.Less
Nineteenth-century American readers regularly encountered powerful and paradoxical images of clergy and women in many fictive genres, a reflection of the cultural tensions manifested in the contemporary pastoral relationship. Sensational novelists such as George Lippard exposed the monstrous incongruity of the “reverend rake.” Sentimental novelist Susan Warner constructed a romantic clerical hero who was both benevolent and despotic in his relationship with the female protagonist, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s minister was impotent, dependent on the women who supported him. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s enduring Scarlet Letter portrayed the pastor as an unworthy saint and Hester Prynne as the worthy sinner. Even pious memoirs and parsonage novels acknowledged the intrusion of sexuality, “something peculiar and insidious” in Stowe’s words, which inevitably corrupted the spiritual relationship between pastors and women. Only transforming it into a marital relationship could, to some degree, resolve the inherent sexual tension.
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469640921
- eISBN:
- 9781469640945
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469640921.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
In this book, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela examines property ownership and its connections to citizenship, race and slavery, and piracy as seen through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ...
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In this book, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela examines property ownership and its connections to citizenship, race and slavery, and piracy as seen through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. Balachandran Orihuela defines piracy expansively, from the familiar concept of nautical pirates and robbery in international waters to postrevolutionary counterfeiting, transnational slave escape, and the illegal trade of cotton across the Americas during the Civil War. Weaving together close readings of American, Chicano, and African American literature with political theory, the author shows that piracy, when represented through literature, has imagined more inclusive and democratic communities than were then possible in reality. The author shows that these subjects are not taking part in unlawful acts only for economic gain. Rather, Balachandran Orihuela argues that piracy might, surprisingly, have served as a public good, representing a form of transnational belonging that transcends membership in any one nation-state while also functioning as a surrogate to citizenship through the ownership of property. These transnational and transactional forms of social and economic life allow for a better understanding of the foundational importance of property ownership and its role in the creation of citizenship.Less
In this book, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela examines property ownership and its connections to citizenship, race and slavery, and piracy as seen through the lens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. Balachandran Orihuela defines piracy expansively, from the familiar concept of nautical pirates and robbery in international waters to postrevolutionary counterfeiting, transnational slave escape, and the illegal trade of cotton across the Americas during the Civil War. Weaving together close readings of American, Chicano, and African American literature with political theory, the author shows that piracy, when represented through literature, has imagined more inclusive and democratic communities than were then possible in reality. The author shows that these subjects are not taking part in unlawful acts only for economic gain. Rather, Balachandran Orihuela argues that piracy might, surprisingly, have served as a public good, representing a form of transnational belonging that transcends membership in any one nation-state while also functioning as a surrogate to citizenship through the ownership of property. These transnational and transactional forms of social and economic life allow for a better understanding of the foundational importance of property ownership and its role in the creation of citizenship.
Kay Yandell
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190901042
- eISBN:
- 9780190901073
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190901042.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
In nineteenth-century America, Native Americans communicated long distance with smoke signals and Indian sign language to combat U.S. invasions across the American plains. Recently immigrated Morse ...
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In nineteenth-century America, Native Americans communicated long distance with smoke signals and Indian sign language to combat U.S. invasions across the American plains. Recently immigrated Morse telegraphers began to organize “online” for safer working conditions. Women telegraphers entered electric speech forums. These interactions inspired the creation of what this book dubs “telegraph literature”—the fiction, poetry, social critique, and autobiography that experiences of telecommunication inspired authors from vastly different social locations to write throughout nineteenth-century America. The telegraphic virtual inspired such canonical authors as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, alongside such lesser known authors as Lida Churchill and Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield, to explore how seemingly instantaneous, disembodied, nationwide speech practices challenged American conceptions of self, text, place, nation, and God.Less
In nineteenth-century America, Native Americans communicated long distance with smoke signals and Indian sign language to combat U.S. invasions across the American plains. Recently immigrated Morse telegraphers began to organize “online” for safer working conditions. Women telegraphers entered electric speech forums. These interactions inspired the creation of what this book dubs “telegraph literature”—the fiction, poetry, social critique, and autobiography that experiences of telecommunication inspired authors from vastly different social locations to write throughout nineteenth-century America. The telegraphic virtual inspired such canonical authors as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, alongside such lesser known authors as Lida Churchill and Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield, to explore how seemingly instantaneous, disembodied, nationwide speech practices challenged American conceptions of self, text, place, nation, and God.
Kay Yandell
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190901042
- eISBN:
- 9780190901073
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190901042.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm explores literatures envisioning the literary, societal, even the perceived metaphysical effects of ...
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Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm explores literatures envisioning the literary, societal, even the perceived metaphysical effects of various cultures’ telecommunications technologies, to argue that nineteenth-century Americans tested in the virtual realm new theories of self, place, and nation for potential enactment in the embodied world. Telegraphies opens with the literatures of such Native telecommunications technologies as smoke signals and sign language chains, to reconceive common notions of telecommunications technologies as synonymous with capitalist industrialization, and to analyze the cultural interactions and literary productions that arose as Native telegraphs worked with and against European American telecommunications systems across nineteenth-century America. Into this conversation the book integrates visions of Morse’s electromagnetic telegraph, with its claims to speak new, coded words and send bodiless, textless prose instantly across the continent. To the many and various telegraphies this book considers, American authors often reacted with a mixture of wonder, hope, and fear. Writers as diverse as Sarah Winnemucca, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson, among others, craft poetic odes, memoirs, and novels that envision how the birth of perceived-instantaneous communication across a vast continent forever alters the way Americans speak, write, form community, and conceive of the divine. While some celebrate far-speaking technologies as conduits of a metaphysical manifest destiny to overspread America’s primitive cultures, others reveal how telecommunication empowers the previously silenced voice to range free in the disembodied virtual realm, even as the body remains confined by race, class, gender, disability, age, or geography.Less
Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm explores literatures envisioning the literary, societal, even the perceived metaphysical effects of various cultures’ telecommunications technologies, to argue that nineteenth-century Americans tested in the virtual realm new theories of self, place, and nation for potential enactment in the embodied world. Telegraphies opens with the literatures of such Native telecommunications technologies as smoke signals and sign language chains, to reconceive common notions of telecommunications technologies as synonymous with capitalist industrialization, and to analyze the cultural interactions and literary productions that arose as Native telegraphs worked with and against European American telecommunications systems across nineteenth-century America. Into this conversation the book integrates visions of Morse’s electromagnetic telegraph, with its claims to speak new, coded words and send bodiless, textless prose instantly across the continent. To the many and various telegraphies this book considers, American authors often reacted with a mixture of wonder, hope, and fear. Writers as diverse as Sarah Winnemucca, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson, among others, craft poetic odes, memoirs, and novels that envision how the birth of perceived-instantaneous communication across a vast continent forever alters the way Americans speak, write, form community, and conceive of the divine. While some celebrate far-speaking technologies as conduits of a metaphysical manifest destiny to overspread America’s primitive cultures, others reveal how telecommunication empowers the previously silenced voice to range free in the disembodied virtual realm, even as the body remains confined by race, class, gender, disability, age, or geography.
Joel Porte
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300104462
- eISBN:
- 9780300130577
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300104462.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Ralp Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also ...
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Ralp Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also be seen as bitter rivals: America's foremost literary statesman, protective of his reputation, and an ambitious and sometimes refractory protege. The truth, this book maintains, is that Emerson and Thoreau were complementary literary geniuses, mutually inspiring and inspired. This book focuses on Emerson and Thoreau as writers. It traces their individual achievements and their points of intersection, arguing that both men, starting from a shared belief in the importance of “self-culture”, produced a body of writing that helped move a decidedly provincial New England readership into the broader arena of international culture.Less
Ralp Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also be seen as bitter rivals: America's foremost literary statesman, protective of his reputation, and an ambitious and sometimes refractory protege. The truth, this book maintains, is that Emerson and Thoreau were complementary literary geniuses, mutually inspiring and inspired. This book focuses on Emerson and Thoreau as writers. It traces their individual achievements and their points of intersection, arguing that both men, starting from a shared belief in the importance of “self-culture”, produced a body of writing that helped move a decidedly provincial New England readership into the broader arena of international culture.
Jason Berger
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823287758
- eISBN:
- 9780823290529
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823287758.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The introduction’s first section argues that, amid neoliberal realities, liberalism’s paradigms are in crisis. Positing the concept of “xenocitizen” as a historical way to begin moving past ...
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The introduction’s first section argues that, amid neoliberal realities, liberalism’s paradigms are in crisis. Positing the concept of “xenocitizen” as a historical way to begin moving past delimiting liberal fantasies, it suggests that contemporary scholarship requires a mode of “actuality without positivism.” The second section uses a hemispheric consideration of Simón de Bolívar’s writing to establish the asymmetrical landscape of nineteenth-century liberalism. Building on these contexts, the last two sections turn directly to the concepts of xenocitizen and ontology: setting the terms of engagement and the conceptual terrain for the chapters that follow.Less
The introduction’s first section argues that, amid neoliberal realities, liberalism’s paradigms are in crisis. Positing the concept of “xenocitizen” as a historical way to begin moving past delimiting liberal fantasies, it suggests that contemporary scholarship requires a mode of “actuality without positivism.” The second section uses a hemispheric consideration of Simón de Bolívar’s writing to establish the asymmetrical landscape of nineteenth-century liberalism. Building on these contexts, the last two sections turn directly to the concepts of xenocitizen and ontology: setting the terms of engagement and the conceptual terrain for the chapters that follow.
Jason Berger
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823287758
- eISBN:
- 9780823290529
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823287758.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter adds a consideration of the economic horizon to contemporary scholarship that examines the radical and, at times, emancipatory “entanglements” between slaves/ex-slaves and the ...
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This chapter adds a consideration of the economic horizon to contemporary scholarship that examines the radical and, at times, emancipatory “entanglements” between slaves/ex-slaves and the environment. The chapter’s three sections present a developing arc of “unadjusted emancipations,” tracing various ways that slaves and ex-slaves negotiated and leveraged the antebellum era’s systemic production of bad debts in order to distort or circumvent standard formations of emancipatory logic. The first examines Stowe’s Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) in light of ecological-economic hermeneutics. In its reading of Dred, the interface between humans and ecology spied by scholars who study the parahuman closes with an unsettling interface between personhood and developing models of capital. The second looks at the ways Brown’s novel Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853) and his appended “Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown” manipulate the era’s production of bad debts in order to craft points of divergence from standard channels of emancipation. The third considers how the titular character of Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859-62) and his “secret” move throughout the South’s plantations in ways that radically compound. Reading the modality of secret as a blurred Moten-esque push toward a fugitive sociality of bad debt, the chapter examines how the novel presents innovative forms of resistant collectivity.Less
This chapter adds a consideration of the economic horizon to contemporary scholarship that examines the radical and, at times, emancipatory “entanglements” between slaves/ex-slaves and the environment. The chapter’s three sections present a developing arc of “unadjusted emancipations,” tracing various ways that slaves and ex-slaves negotiated and leveraged the antebellum era’s systemic production of bad debts in order to distort or circumvent standard formations of emancipatory logic. The first examines Stowe’s Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) in light of ecological-economic hermeneutics. In its reading of Dred, the interface between humans and ecology spied by scholars who study the parahuman closes with an unsettling interface between personhood and developing models of capital. The second looks at the ways Brown’s novel Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853) and his appended “Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown” manipulate the era’s production of bad debts in order to craft points of divergence from standard channels of emancipation. The third considers how the titular character of Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859-62) and his “secret” move throughout the South’s plantations in ways that radically compound. Reading the modality of secret as a blurred Moten-esque push toward a fugitive sociality of bad debt, the chapter examines how the novel presents innovative forms of resistant collectivity.
Jason Berger
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823287758
- eISBN:
- 9780823290529
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823287758.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter offers a competing portrait of Margaret Fuller’s brand of political citizenship. By examining Fuller’s earlier work, especially her writings about music, a new version of her political ...
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This chapter offers a competing portrait of Margaret Fuller’s brand of political citizenship. By examining Fuller’s earlier work, especially her writings about music, a new version of her political and social views becomes visible. The affective and formal elements of Fuller’s thought—where various sounds, tones, and pulsations explicitly and/or implicitly mediated her thinking about material reality—reveal a complex dialectic between the personal and the social. Going much further than merely revising the common historical narrative that sees Fuller moving from romantic to radical modes of thinking after her departure for Europe in 1846, the chapter portrays how Fuller develops a model of nineteenth-century political personhood that literary scholars and historians alike have yet to fully address.Less
This chapter offers a competing portrait of Margaret Fuller’s brand of political citizenship. By examining Fuller’s earlier work, especially her writings about music, a new version of her political and social views becomes visible. The affective and formal elements of Fuller’s thought—where various sounds, tones, and pulsations explicitly and/or implicitly mediated her thinking about material reality—reveal a complex dialectic between the personal and the social. Going much further than merely revising the common historical narrative that sees Fuller moving from romantic to radical modes of thinking after her departure for Europe in 1846, the chapter portrays how Fuller develops a model of nineteenth-century political personhood that literary scholars and historians alike have yet to fully address.
Ivy G. Wilson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479857722
- eISBN:
- 9781479818334
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479857722.003.0013
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This concluding chapter cites Haiti—its shadow relationship to the United States; its minor and minoritarian archives; its role as a ligament in the body of hemispheric history—to draw parallels ...
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This concluding chapter cites Haiti—its shadow relationship to the United States; its minor and minoritarian archives; its role as a ligament in the body of hemispheric history—to draw parallels between the various models of minoritarian criticism presented in the book. Presenting these parallels also demands the drawing of links between the figurative and everyday, that is, the costs of moving ground that is most recently signified by the Haitian earthquake. In seeking to reframe the terrain of political critique, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti stands as a tragic reminder of its stakes: not an excavating of deeper and new meanings, but rather the forceful eruption of them. The chapter stresses on how the book aims to move critical discourse out of its divided formations, and instead wade in an ongoing uncertainty that can take no refuge in the calm waters identified as nineteenth-century American literature.Less
This concluding chapter cites Haiti—its shadow relationship to the United States; its minor and minoritarian archives; its role as a ligament in the body of hemispheric history—to draw parallels between the various models of minoritarian criticism presented in the book. Presenting these parallels also demands the drawing of links between the figurative and everyday, that is, the costs of moving ground that is most recently signified by the Haitian earthquake. In seeking to reframe the terrain of political critique, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti stands as a tragic reminder of its stakes: not an excavating of deeper and new meanings, but rather the forceful eruption of them. The chapter stresses on how the book aims to move critical discourse out of its divided formations, and instead wade in an ongoing uncertainty that can take no refuge in the calm waters identified as nineteenth-century American literature.
Jason Berger
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823287758
- eISBN:
- 9780823290529
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823287758.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter takes as its starting point contemporary new materialist approaches to Henry David Thoreau’s writing, especially the work of scholars such as Branka Arsić and Jane Bennett. Complicating ...
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This chapter takes as its starting point contemporary new materialist approaches to Henry David Thoreau’s writing, especially the work of scholars such as Branka Arsić and Jane Bennett. Complicating the Deleuzian- and neo-Spinozan-influenced forms of democratic vitalism attributed to Thoreau, this chapter traces a competing mode of materialism in Thoreau’s thought, one that is inherently dialectical and, by all standards, illiberal. Building loosely on the speculative ecological work of scholars such as Monique Allewaert and Michael Marder, it argues that Thoreau’s vision of nature in his early works is allied with his subsequent radical political pronouncements in the mid- and late-1850s. The chapter traces the structural aspects of Thoreau’s unique dialectical approach toward materiality and historical reality, examining the types of political ontologies and actants that emerge within these dynamic material relations as well as their specific stakes for antebellum society.Less
This chapter takes as its starting point contemporary new materialist approaches to Henry David Thoreau’s writing, especially the work of scholars such as Branka Arsić and Jane Bennett. Complicating the Deleuzian- and neo-Spinozan-influenced forms of democratic vitalism attributed to Thoreau, this chapter traces a competing mode of materialism in Thoreau’s thought, one that is inherently dialectical and, by all standards, illiberal. Building loosely on the speculative ecological work of scholars such as Monique Allewaert and Michael Marder, it argues that Thoreau’s vision of nature in his early works is allied with his subsequent radical political pronouncements in the mid- and late-1850s. The chapter traces the structural aspects of Thoreau’s unique dialectical approach toward materiality and historical reality, examining the types of political ontologies and actants that emerge within these dynamic material relations as well as their specific stakes for antebellum society.
Jason Berger
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823287758
- eISBN:
- 9780823290529
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823287758.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Sociality under the sign of liberalism has seemingly come to an end—or, at least, is in dire crisis. Xenocitizens returns to the antebellum United States in order to intervene in a wide field of ...
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Sociality under the sign of liberalism has seemingly come to an end—or, at least, is in dire crisis. Xenocitizens returns to the antebellum United States in order to intervene in a wide field of responses to our present economic and existential precarity. In this incisive study, Berger challenges a shaken but still standing scholarly tradition based on liberal-humanist perspectives. Through the concept of xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms “xeno,” which connotes alien or stranger, and “citizen,” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, the book uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Xenocitizens glimpses how antebellum writers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and crisis, startlingly unique ontological and social models for thinking about personhood and sociality as well as unfamiliar ways to exist and to leverage change. Today, the old liberal-national model of citizen is not only problematic, but also tactically anachronistic. And yet, standard liberal assumptions that undergird the fading realities of humanist and democratic traditions often linger within emerging scholarly work that seeks to move past them. Innovatively reorienting our thinking about traditional nineteenth-century figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau as well as formative writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, Xenocitizens offers us a new nineteenth century—pushing our imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.Less
Sociality under the sign of liberalism has seemingly come to an end—or, at least, is in dire crisis. Xenocitizens returns to the antebellum United States in order to intervene in a wide field of responses to our present economic and existential precarity. In this incisive study, Berger challenges a shaken but still standing scholarly tradition based on liberal-humanist perspectives. Through the concept of xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms “xeno,” which connotes alien or stranger, and “citizen,” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, the book uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Xenocitizens glimpses how antebellum writers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and crisis, startlingly unique ontological and social models for thinking about personhood and sociality as well as unfamiliar ways to exist and to leverage change. Today, the old liberal-national model of citizen is not only problematic, but also tactically anachronistic. And yet, standard liberal assumptions that undergird the fading realities of humanist and democratic traditions often linger within emerging scholarly work that seeks to move past them. Innovatively reorienting our thinking about traditional nineteenth-century figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau as well as formative writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, Xenocitizens offers us a new nineteenth century—pushing our imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.
Jason Berger
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823287758
- eISBN:
- 9780823290529
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823287758.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter reexamines Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early thinking about the relation of the individual to universal Reason, revealing that Emerson’s writing is philosophically consistent in its insistence ...
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This chapter reexamines Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early thinking about the relation of the individual to universal Reason, revealing that Emerson’s writing is philosophically consistent in its insistence that the human self is “operative” in form and function. Shifting our conceptual perspective from a traditional Matthiessenian notion of an “optative mood” to something of a Badiouian “operative mood” opens up new ways to consider how, across the early works, the Emersonian self is shaped by interactions with an impersonal Other as well as the ways these interactions influence the self’s relation to historical landscapes. Intervening in scholarship on Emersonian personhood by scholars such as Sharon Cameron, Branka Arsić, and Donald Pease, this chapter offers an original version of Emerson’s political vision, one that finds in his theory of “religious sentiment” a model for the self that may reframe all of Emerson’s corpus.Less
This chapter reexamines Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early thinking about the relation of the individual to universal Reason, revealing that Emerson’s writing is philosophically consistent in its insistence that the human self is “operative” in form and function. Shifting our conceptual perspective from a traditional Matthiessenian notion of an “optative mood” to something of a Badiouian “operative mood” opens up new ways to consider how, across the early works, the Emersonian self is shaped by interactions with an impersonal Other as well as the ways these interactions influence the self’s relation to historical landscapes. Intervening in scholarship on Emersonian personhood by scholars such as Sharon Cameron, Branka Arsić, and Donald Pease, this chapter offers an original version of Emerson’s political vision, one that finds in his theory of “religious sentiment” a model for the self that may reframe all of Emerson’s corpus.
Jason Berger
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823287758
- eISBN:
- 9780823290529
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823287758.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This brief epilogue ruminates on the theme of care. Building on the previous chapters’ examinations of xenocitizens, it offers a timely call for new forms of political orientation.
This brief epilogue ruminates on the theme of care. Building on the previous chapters’ examinations of xenocitizens, it offers a timely call for new forms of political orientation.
