Emerson and Other Minds by Michael J Colacurcio

Emerson and Other Minds by Michael J Colacurcio

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.

Michael J. Colacurcio is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781481311779
ISBN 10	1481311778
Title	Emerson and Other Minds
Author	Michael J Colacurcio
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Baylor University Press
Year published	2020-12-30
Number of pages	450
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable