Religions > Atheism > OT: It's Emerson's Anniversary and He's Nailed 21st-Century America
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
10 Aug 2003 02:05:47 PM |
| Object: |
OT: It's Emerson's Anniversary and He's Nailed 21st-Century America |
'Emerson': Song of Himself
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/books/review/10WEINAP.html?pagewanted=all&position=
By BRENDA WINEAPPLE
NOT for nothing did Henry James Sr. call Ralph Waldo Emerson a man
without a handle. Ever since the craggy-faced former minister took to
-- and dominated -- the lecture circuit in the 1830's, Emerson's
readers have been trying to grasp him. Is he the granddaddy of
American laissez-faire capitalism, his doctrine of unfettered
individualism a kind of spiritual vacuum cleaner sucking everything --
other people, nature, society -- into its self-inflated bag? So
Quentin Anderson argued in "The Imperial Self" (1971), a book about
the American narcissism Emerson presumably helped to begin. Or maybe
Emerson is the public intellectual who spawned the progressive
pragmatism of William James (Henry Sr.'s eldest son) and John Dewey on
the philosophical side, the poetics of Whitman and Gertrude Stein on
the literary. Is he a social reformer? A lonely prophet writing
obscurantist prose? A proto-Nietzschean sponsor of the superman? Or
just a cold New England fish?
Lawrence Buell
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&scoring=d&q=Emerson+%22Lawrence+Buell%22&sa=N&tab=gw
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OT: It's Emerson's Anniversary and He's Nailed 21st-Century America
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=18510aff.0305040103.6d53b0e4%40posting.google.com
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