Major, William, and Bryan Sinche. "Giving Emerson the Boot." CHRONICLE REVIEW January 17, 2010.

Americanists of the world, unite! Weary with the cult of Ralph Waldo Emerson—the Sage of Concord, the Father of American Transcendentalism—ours is a call to arms. We have awakened from a century-long sleep to find ourselves confronted with a grave mistake, an intellectual blunder: an unseemly idolatry for one of the most confounding of American writers. Speed thee to thy rest, pernicious Sage, for we will submit our students to you no more. What is it about the old man that so vexes? To begin, there's the ego. Other than the odd English major, virtually every student encountering Emerson for the first time (there's almost never a second) gains very little from the exercise other than a rough appreciation for what it must be like to sit in the company of a boorish deity. Emerson writes from on high. (Is it any wonder that another boor, Frank Lloyd Wright, was such a devoted follower?) Our man has taken in a holy draught of air and unfortunately decided to let it out, and his followers have been keen on following the scent ever since. Our students, however, rightly detect something more foul. What a student finds, in fact, is a set of contradictory, baffling, radical, reactionary ideas that offer no practical guidelines for actual human behavior. And that's the good news. Most students can hardly be expected to grapple with Emerson's Nature or "Experience" with any degree of efficacy. They may come to understand some of the major principles and tensions and perhaps, later on in some dark hour, Emerson will re-emerge to teach a lesson about not trusting appearances or the value of stoicism. In all likelihood, students will leave Emerson having been immersed in a confused stew of 19th-century occultism offered up in schizophrenic prose. And we, their professors, often act as if their difficulties stemmed from their own lack of imagination. The fault, though, is that of the author. Because of Emerson's obscurantist and peripatetic style, his meanings—assuming there are some—are hidden. Consider this koan, one among many: "It is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should contain somewhat progressive. Uses that are exhausted or that may be, and facts that end in the statement, cannot be all that is true of this brave lodging wherein man is harbored, and wherein all his faculties find appropriate and endless exercise. And all the uses of nature admit of being summed in one, which yields the activity of man an infinite scope." That is the prose of a crazy person. . . .

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/Giving-Emerson-the-Boot/63512/.

O'Connor, David K. Review of Richard Deming's LISTENING ON ALL SIDES. NDPR (June 2009).

Deming, Richard. Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. Richard Deming's main project is to use the responsive openness called for in interpreting a text as a model for the ethical demands of human relationships. His secondary aim is to show that European literary theory and classical American literature are not strangers to each other, and in fact take up many of the same hopes and anxieties. The breadth and generosity of Deming's intellectual engagements are evident everywhere, and they account for the book's clear success in its secondary aim, as well as what I think are its interesting failures in its primary task. The author has done what his title asks, and listened on all sides, but his ethics is too undemanding to live up to Emerson's challenge. The "sociality" of language, writes Deming, "brings up close the issue of ethics" (14). In a way, it is no surprise that Ralph Waldo Emerson figures prominently in such a project. "I do then with my friends as I do with my books," Emerson said, and he meant it. For Emerson, reading and writing are the paradigm of all human life, and Deming does Emerson no violence in looking to him for an "ethics of reading," that is, to find guidance in our practices of attentive reading for how to treat people. Drawing the link between hermeneutics and ethics, however, may sound like rather a "continental" project, deriving as it does from early German Romantics such as the Schlegels and Schleiermacher, and having been given a major impetus by Gadamer (who quite surprisingly is never mentioned in the book). Indeed, Deming's theoretical orientation is much influenced by more recent heirs of this tradition: by Deleuze's Nietzsche readings, by Derrida, by The Literary Absolute of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, by Charles Altieri's critical work on modernism and its aftermaths. The Heideggerian gesture of the book's subtitle is also not out of place. However, after the introductory theoretical chapter, Deming focuses on classics of American literature to pursue his theme, devoting a chapter essay each to Emerson, Herman Melville, and the pair Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman all make more than cameo appearances. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16446.

McCall, Corey. "Review of John T. Lysaker's EMERSON AND SELF-CULTURE." NDPR (November 2008).

Update (December 3, 2008): Here is Professor Lysaker's response to the review which he kindly sent to Philosophy's Other: Professor McCall's thoughtful and kind review raises an interesting question that I'd like to share. He claims that my book "fails as a guide to Emerson's writings, but as a provocation to think along with him, it must be judged a success." And earlier, he suggests that this is not a book to "... recommend to scholars of philosophy who desire a basic overview of Emerson and his relevance for philosophy." These claims, fair on the face of it, have led me to ask: what must one do in order to "demonstrate" Emerson's "relevance" to philosophy? I fear that a basic overview will miss Emerson entirely, and not just Emerson the writer, but Emerson the philosopher. I say this because I believe that Emerson's relevance for philosophy in part lies in the ethos his work embodies, an ethos evident in how he inhabits his language, though not only there. With "inhabits his language," I have in mind his work's [1] semantic content (I think here of his puns), [2] his rhetorical forms (I think here of the essay and the interanimating sections of "Experience"), and [3] his manner of addressing readers (I think here of his provocations but also his cheering voice). Now, in writing Emerson and Self-Culture, I self-consciously chose to 'demonstrate' that ethos by working very carefully with Emerson's language. Second, I tried to embody that ethos by receiving (and transmitting) it in kind, that is, by 'taking Emerson personally,' by being provoked and provocative, by running with puns, by writing essays, and by allowing my life to be called into question by what Emerson ventures, that is, by essaying to be. In other words, what McCall terms my "profoundly Emersonian spirit" is, in its spirit and letter, very much an effort to "demonstrate" what Emerson has to offer philosophy. Original Post (December 2, 2008): Lysaker, John T. Emerson and Self-Culture. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008. Until quite recently, philosophy departments have generally proven inhospitable ground for interpretations of the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. With the exception of Classical American thinkers such as William James and John Dewey, few philosophers have acknowledged Emerson as a precursor, leaving him to their colleagues in Literature and American Studies Departments. With the eclipse of Pragmatism and the ascendancy of analytic philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century, Emerson was largely forgotten by philosophers. While this situation largely remains unchanged, there are some nascent signs that philosophers are beginning to reconsider Emerson as a philosopher. Led by thinkers such as Stanley Cavell and Russell Goodman, philosophers are beginning to re-assess the significance of Emerson as a thinker. Lysaker's book fits in this company, but the fit is an uncomfortable one. Unlike Cavell and Goodman, Lysaker presents a deeply personal response to Emerson through a series of close readings that center around the notion of self-culture in his work. In this way, his reading is performative, for one of his stated tasks is to sound out the dimension of the personal in Emerson's corpus through a highly personal reading of various Emersonian texts. Lysaker's own accounting of his sustained reading of Emerson is often commendable and rewarding, but at the same time his book is certainly not one to recommend to scholars of philosophy who desire a basic overview of Emerson and his relevance for philosophy. This is certainly by design, for the Emerson we find in the pages of Lysaker's book is a living, breathing, complex individual that is clearly of deep consequence for Lysaker himself -- his book is by no means about Emerson in some distant, scholarly manner. Such overt enthusiasm brings its own risks. I shall return to both the risks taken by Lysaker in this book and the question of the potential audience for this book by way of conclusion. First, I offer a brief overview of the commendable aspects of Lysaker's interesting book. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14766.