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Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 2008"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In fact, very few Americans cherished Whittier for his antislavery activism before the American Civil War as discussed by the authors, and this concentrated disavowal of his anti-slavery work meant that readers had to ignore most of his poetry in order to celebrate him as a poet.
Abstract: N american poet was more celebrated in the late nineteenth century than John Greenleaf Whittier. In December 1877 his seventieth birthday was nationally recognized and publicly honored by schoolchildren, teachers, reading groups, ministers, fellow authors, politicians, and newspapers and magazines across the country (at the end of the year he allegedly wrote twenty-three hundred replies to well-wishers) (Letters 3: 367). Schools, colleges, streets, ships, towns, mountains, and even a glacier were all named in his honor during the last decades of his life. But this massive memorial effort belied the relatively slender poetic basis of Whittier’s popular poetic celebrity after the American Civil War. Americans of the postbellum era celebrated Whittier for being the poet of everyday life in rural New England, and for writing poems that captured the texture of New England history, supernaturalism, and folklore; very few Americans cherished Whittier for his antislavery activism before the Civil War. This concentrated disavowal of his antislavery work meant that readers had to ignore most of Whittier’s poetry in order to celebrate him as a poet. Whittier’s career had begun in the 1820s; he had become prominent as an antislavery poet associated first with William Lloyd Garrison, then with the political antislavery movement, and eventually with the Republican Party. He published scores of antislavery poems from the 1830s onward, which were printed in broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, books, giftbooks, and anthologies, and which were recited and sung frequently throughout the antebellum decades and during the Civil War.

58 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the antebellum era, physicians defined hypochondria as a functional disorder of the nervous system that began with a somatic cause, dyspepsia, and had a wide range of psychological symptoms, including melancholy, ennui, imagined illness, and imagined bodily transformations as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: I the novels that have become critical touchstones for understanding cross-racial sympathy in the antebellum era—works such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) or Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851)—medical constructions of the mind and its diseases play a profoundly important but still overlooked role. Indeed, antebellum authors such as Stowe, Melville, and Poe repeatedly, and sometimes histrionically, foreground one nervous disorder in particular: hypochondria.1 They do so in order to imagine the stakes and consequences of imagined sympathy across racial boundaries. For although “hypochondria” survives today as a way to characterize those who believe they are ill when they are not, the antebellum disorder it named was much more expansive and suggestive than this. Physicians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century defined hypochondria as a functional disorder of the nervous system that began with a somatic cause, dyspepsia, and had a wide range of psychological symptoms, including melancholy, ennui, imagined illness, and imagined bodily transformations. The protean nature of hypochondria, in which such disparate symptoms as these could be the means of diagnosing the dis-

14 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the protagonist, Dylan Ebdus, returns to his childhood home in Brooklyn to visit his father and discovers that the neighborhood has been renamed Boerum Hill and gentrified.
Abstract: L in jonathan lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003), the protagonist, Dylan Ebdus, returns to his childhood home in Brooklyn to visit his father. The year is 1999 and, although it is Dylan’s first time home after almost a decade spent living in California, the trip is hardly a triumphant return to the old neighborhood. Known as Gowanus when he lived there during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the neighborhood, Dylan discovers, has been renamed Boerum Hill and gentrified. Indeed, signs of the process are everywhere. He notes, for instance, that a formerly abandoned house was no longer abandoned, and that “all along the block . . . brownstone lintels and steps [had been] refreshed . . . [and] gatework repaired and reblacked . . . . Even the slate was straight and neat, repointed like the brick, where it hadn’t been replaced by poured concrete” (433). As a result of such changes, only traces of the Gowanus he once knew remain “glinting under the veneer” of Boerum Hill (429). Despite what appears to be the neighborhood’s revitalization, Dylan, Lethem writes, cannot bring himself to celebrate the change. Instead, he is unsettled by the uneasy mixture of old and new and the past and the present that he encounters while walking down the block he knew as a child. Balancing his memories of the old neighborhood and the few traces that remain with the reality of a gentrified present, Dylan “feel[s] the juxtaposition, the crush of time” (432). As he takes in Boerum Hill’s growing gentrified

11 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the blithedale romance as discussed by the authors, Nathaniel Hawthorne captures Victorian America's obsession with domestication: better nature through human intervention. And in Coverdale's qualified salute to Zenobia's robust, earthy, and rather theatrical womanhood, we see antebellum Americans' competing desires for untrammeled nature and careful control.
Abstract: I ‘the blithedale romance’ Nathaniel Hawthorne captures Victorian America’s obsession with domestication: better nature through human intervention. The novel figures Zenobia, one of its two central women, as a spectacular but short-lived, hothouse flower. Miles Coverdale, captivated by Zenobia’s distinctive charms, selects her vigorous bloom as preferable to the feminine delicacy admired by the cultivated classes. In his first description of her, Coverdale focuses on the colorful blossom adorning her abundant hair. That “exotic” accessory, “as fresh as if the hot-house gardener had just clipt it from the stem . . . So brilliant, so rare . . . and yet enduring for only a day,” he muses, “has struck deep root into my memory.” The flower facilitates a reader’s understanding of its wearer, whom Coverdale describes as “an admirable figure of a woman . . . with a combination of features which it is safe to call remarkably beautiful, even if some fastidious persons might pronounce them a little deficient in softness and delicacy.” Though a flower most commonly represents the beauty of simple, unmolested nature, Coverdale points out that Zenobia’s “costly” indulgence, worn in the midst of a New England snow storm, signals the “pride and pomp” that “had a luxuriant growth in Zenobia’s character” (15). In a modernizing New England, the distinctive exotic is a commodity made available only through the machinations of international trade and involved horticulture—it is a telling product of a new America, fast moving from its status as an isolated agrarian nation into its role as a significant player in international trade and global politics. And in Coverdale’s qualified salute to Zenobia’s robust, earthy, and rather theatrical womanhood, we see antebellum Americans’ competing desires for untrammeled nature and careful control. An icon of a contradictory age, Zenobia, like the hothouse flower she wears, is both shockingly

10 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, Derrida suggests that the elegiac strain in friendship and the structure of friendship implicit in elegy points to an ethical quandary central to the very form of address that brings into focus both friendship and mourning as two resembling (and mutually enabling) modes of relationality.
Abstract: “N great discourse on friendship ,” writes Derrida, “will ever have eluded the major rhetoric of epitaphios, and hence of some form of transfixed celebration of spectrality, at once fervent and already caught in the deathly or petrified cold of its inscription” (Politics 94). The shift between the fervor and the cold of spectral “inscription” marks an ambivalence that is intrinsic to friendship’s rhetoric, and also characterizes two different forms of represention: one celebratory and odic, the other ossifying in its evidentiary registering of the dead. Of course, Derrida means to suggest that these two kinds of representation are of a piece—that the elegiac strain in friendship (or the structure of friendship implicit in elegy) points to an ethical quandary central to the very form of address that brings into focus both friendship and mourning as two resembling (and mutually enabling) modes of relationality.

8 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the protagonist detective, Blue, is metaphorically imprisoned in a small room, condemned to the monotony of watching another man, Black, and waiting for him to do something.
Abstract: T much of paul auster’s Ghosts, the protagonist detective, Blue, is metaphorically imprisoned in a small room, condemned to the monotony of watching another man, Black, and waiting for him to do something. Eventually, however, Blue begins to break from his routine, leaving his room on occasion because he feels so close to Black that he knows what his counterpart will do even when he is not being watched. Two of Blue’s early adventures expose a blind spot in Blue’s vision, however, a crucial problem for a man whose job it is to watch another. In the first such adventure: “Blue goes to the small grassy yard . . . studying the bronze statue of Henry Ward Beecher. Two slaves are holding on to Beecher’s legs, as though begging him to help them, to make them free at last, and in the brick wall behind there is a porcelain relief of Abraham Lincoln. Blue cannot but feel inspired by these images, and . . . his head fills with noble thoughts of the dignity of man” (189). It is clear in this passage that Blue’s blind spot is race, or in some sense, “color,” despite his name. The statue depicts Beecher as the white hero of the abolitionist movement. The historical truth, however, is more ambivalent, with most accounts of Beecher portraying him not only as an abolitionist, but also as a racist and opportunist whose opposition to slavery was not accompanied by a belief in the social and essential equality of blacks and whites. Indeed, Beecher’s abolitionist

7 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Dream Songs' use of blackface in the 1960s as mentioned in this paper is a classic example of a problematic aspect of the poem, and it is worth noting that it was originally written by a liberal intellectual in the early 1960s.
Abstract: J berryman’s decision to have his main character Henry in The Dream Songs perform “sometimes in blackface” came as a shock (Dream vi). Not only did the inclusion of dialect radically unsettle his once conservative literary voice, but here was a liberal intellectual in the 1960s apparently reverting to the crudest racial stereotyping of the past. Here was a character appearing to black up in the minstrel tradition to become “Mr. Bones,” performing minstrelsy skits with his fellow “end man,” and speaking in a dialect that approximated the offensive invention of white racists. Early responses to the poem were mostly so confused that the shock was somewhat mitigated by the general sense of disorientation; as critics began to unpick the Songs’ many-leveled influences, the minstrelsy elements began to be examined in more detail, and uncertainty over how to react to them gave way to the sense of a need to account for them, an urge to explain away that has led to traduction of their actual content and their function. Surveying the whole body of criticism today it becomes clear that little perspective has ever been gained on this problematic mode. There is an urgent need for a reassessment and indeed a reorientation of this perplexing and uncompromising aspect of one of the mid-twentieth century’s most important poems. Despite their varied interpretations, discussions of The Dream Songs’ blackface are almost invariably framed in terms of an argument about legitimacy. Most critics, seemingly embarrassed by this anachronistic usage—coterminous with the Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and ’60s—have sought to justify the move. Kathe Davis, despite going further than most in analysing the constitution and function of

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: I 'platoon' as mentioned in this paper is a semi-autobiographical 1986 film about the Vietnam War, where audiences witnessed a curious foregrounding of the Civil War, not Vietnam's struggle for national sovereignty, which escalated, due to US interference, into a vicious and protracted conflict between the North and South of that nation, but the American Civil War.
Abstract: I ‘platoon,’ oliver stone’s semi-autobiographical 1986 film about the Vietnam War, audiences witnessed a curious foregrounding of the Civil War—not Vietnam’s struggle for national sovereignty, which escalated, due in part to US interference, into a vicious and protracted conflict between the North and South of that nation, but the American Civil War. Protagonist Chris Taylor, reflecting at the end of the film on the conflict between his platoon’s opposing camps, concludes that “we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves; and the enemy was us.” As Vietnam War scholar Keith Beattie has argued, this final voice-over suggests that the greatest obstacle to peace is American disunity (2). Less than a generation later, however, we are told that we must be united to go successfully into war: “United We Stand” was the widely-circulated catch-phrase for the American response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a slogan reproduced upon untold mountains of merchandise items. The phrase itself—partly declarative, partly prescriptive—became a crucial touchstone in the narrative of the event in both official policy and popular understanding. It was invoked to give a name to the compassionate acts of individuals who helped each other through the tragedy, both within and outside of New York; and ultimately, it co-opted this authentic goodwill into an official script about the necessity of retaliatory war. The wistful desire for unity, which was clearly not forthcoming, underlined a reactionary impulse to invoke and relive a triumphalist past where “we” prevailed spectacularly over

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In Dusk of Dawn as mentioned in this paper, Du Bois traces the song's rich textuality, emphasizing the "meaning of the music" over the lost meaning of the words and emphasizing the kinship between African slaves.
Abstract: Emphasizing the “meaning of the music” over the lost meaning of the words, Du Bois traces the song’s rich textuality. Perhaps drawn from an earlier African generation, his great-grandmother’s melody moves through physical contact with children and children’s children to be transcribed and reiterated on the pages of Du Bois’s books. The story suggests a level of familial identification, but Du Bois’s point is obviously a “cultural connection” forged by deliberate exchange rather than founded in biology. In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois immediately follows this account of racial identification with its precise opposite on a national scale; in honor of his great-great-grandfather’s role in the Revolutionary War, Du Bois was elected in 1908 to become a member of the Massachusetts Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. This membership was quickly “suspended,” however, by a request made by A. Howard Clark, then secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and secretary of the American Historical Association, for documentation. Clark, Du Bois explains, “knew, of course, that the birth record of a stolen African slave could not possibly be produced” (114–15).

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For instance, National Geographic's place in the cultural imagination has persistently been identified with a primitivist photographic genre: the photographs of far-flung places and peoples its early twentieth-century readers came to associate with the magazine's ethnographic authority and aesthetic visual appeal.
Abstract: B with its january 1896 issue, National Geographic, which originated in 1888 as a specialized journal for American geographers, refashioned itself as an “illustrated monthly” and published its first nude photograph, a wedding portrait of a bare-chested Zulu bride and bridegroom. In subsequent decades, National Geographic’s place in the cultural imagination has persistently been identified with a primitivist photographic genre: the photographs of far-flung places and peoples its early twentieth-century readers came to associate with the magazine’s ethnographic authority and aesthetic visual appeal. “Give us the romance of geography—the lands and the peoples, in little or unknown places,” demanded a reader in 1921, expressing a common sentiment among Geographic readers, in which the “romance” of cultural difference and its aesthetic appreciation was understood as entirely compatible with the magazine’s scientific mission (Claflin). Cultural critics have continued in this same vein, long identifying National Geographic with an imperialist sexual politics in which images of the far-flung and exotic predominate.1 Nonetheless, there are a number of significant ways in which early twentieth-century National Geographic photographs and texts can be understood to complicate this reception. For one, articles on such home-spun subjects as native grasses, backyard insects, and the Indians of North America were as much a staple of the “romance” of geography in National Geographic as its more exotic—and erotic—content. In this regard, National Geographic had just as much in common with its literary contemporary, local-color fiction, and with

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Michaels argues that Cather's 1925 novel The Professor's House is a reaction to the threat posed to American identity by the influx of immigrants in the early twentieth century, a threat dramatized by the marriage between the “unusual and exotic” (64) Jewish entrepreneur Louie Marsellus and Cather as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: A the heart of walter benn michaels’s study of American modernism, Our America, is the contention that Willa Cather’s 1925 novel The Professor’s House imagines “identity [as] a function of inheritance” (37).1 Michaels argues that this logic aligns the novel with the highly restrictive Johnson-Reed Immigration Bill of 1924, which “transform[ed] American identity from the sort of thing that could be acquired (through naturalization) into the sort of thing that had to be inherited (from one’s parents)” (8). What Americans were believed to inherit, however, was “not just a biology, [but] a culture” (37). Michaels offers as an example of this cultural inheritance the central event in Cather’s text: the discovery by a young American boy, Tom Outland, of a long-abandoned Indian cliff city at the top of a mesa in New Mexico. Tom imagines this discovery in terms of the acquisition of a long-lost family, speaking fondly of his “poor grandmothers” who died “a thousand years ago” (The Professor’s House 219). This unlikely conversion of dead Native Americans into family ancestors is a reaction, Michaels suggests, to the threat posed to American identity by the influx of immigrants in the early twentieth century, a threat dramatized in The Professor’s House by the marriage between the “unusual and exotic” (64) Jewish entrepreneur Louie Marsellus and

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors reproduce the entirety of Wallace Stevens' quotation from Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and in brackets they include some material from Bergson that Stevens excludes.
Abstract: I his 1943 talk at mount holyoke college , Wallace Stevens read a quotation from Two Sources of Morality and Religion, a book that represents the culmination of Henri Bergson’s political thought. The quotation is highly elliptical, consisting of four splintered sentences, culled from three paragraphs of the original text. In italics I reproduce the entirety of Stevens’ quotation, and in brackets I include some material from Bergson that Stevens excludes:

Journal ArticleDOI
Abstract: In trickster’s case, how did mental fakery come to replace incarnate fakery? It is one thing for trypanosomes to change their skins; another for Raven to become a leaf floating in spring water; another still for storytellers to have imagined Raven in the first place, or for one of us to reimagine him. Before picking these strands apart, however, we should remember that the mythology itself asks us to confuse them. Coyote stories point to coyotes teaching about the mind, the stories themselves look to predator-prey relationships for the birth of cunning. These myths suggest that blending natural history and mental phenomena is not an unthinkable conflation, but on the contrary, an accurate description of the way things are. To learn about intelligence from Coyote the meat thief is to know that we are embodied thinkers. If the brain has cunning, it has it as a consequence of appetite; the blood that lights the mind gets its sugars from the gut. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the modern era, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Stanley Kubrick have taken up this ancient mythos and made it the frame of their greatest works as discussed by the authors, and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) exceeded all of these: it would dramatize the origins and destiny of human intelligence.
Abstract: H ‘odyssey’ has long inspired poets, artists, and philosophers. Porphyry, the neo-Platonic philosopher, saw in it the archetypal journey of the soul. From its home in the eternal realm, it journeys through the seas of time and space, resisting and then yielding to the lure of matter, but finally returning in triumph to its timeless home. This essential schema, described by Porphyry in “The Cave of the Nymphs,” found expression in countless Gnostic forms in the Hellenic period and would be enshrined afterward in Christian metaphysics. Dante, who did not know Homer’s poem first-hand, made of Odysseus a figure of the rootless modern: his hero forsakes home because of an unrelenting desire for novelty and experience. In the modern era, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Stanley Kubrick have taken up this ancient mythos and made it the frame of their greatest works. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom is a little man, short on heroism but long on humanity, who journeys through a day in June without notable accomplishment. Pound’s Odyssean persona in The Cantos journeys through the centuries and across the globe, witnessing and engaging the rise and decline of civilizations. The temporal scope of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) exceeded all of these: it would dramatize the origins and destiny of human intelligence. Kubrick’s Odyssey holds a unique place in the arc of his films: it alone maintains a largely un-ironic vision of the human enterprise. Positioned between the apocalyptic satire of Dr. Strangelove (1964) and the satire on free will and conditioning in A Clockwork Orange (1971), 2001: A Space Odyssey is an awe-inspiring expression of the sublime reaches and potential of human imagination and achievement. Imag-

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) as discussed by the authors is a classic example of a novel that can be seen as a metaphor for the fall of intellectual America from innocence into knowledge.
Abstract: C have long characterized Harold Frederic’s novel The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) as the story of America’s putting away of childish things. Written during a decade when American society was part way through a social paradigm shift into the high gear of industrial modernity, Frederic’s novel clearly defines the moment it narrates in terms of transition. Into the past it casts away simple, straightforward religious faith, a universe naively conceived of as governed by a physical and moral order whose terms are set by a benign deity, and absolute social and ethical codes. Into the future it projects uncertainty, relativism, secular pragmatism, and the death of the soul. The book has thus been read as “a symbolic tale of America’s progress to disunity” (Ziff 214), or “the fall of intellectual America from innocence into knowledge” (Carter xvii). Because of this, scholars have often interpreted the novel as unreservedly bleak in its prognosis of American society, a “satiric bonfire” offering no hope of progress (Michelson 71), an antimodern lament that “neither science nor aestheticism can replace what it has destroyed” (Ziff 214).1 In this essay I will examine more closely the role of “aestheticism” and the aesthetic in Frederic’s novel, with the aim of addressing the claim (implicit in the work of those critics who see the book as wholly pessimistic) that, for Frederic, aesthetic experience had no value as a guide to ethical behavior. There is an important difference between the ethical possibilities of the flawed aesthetic theories that the novel convincingly debunks and those afforded by the literary aesthetics of

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Foucauldian racial theory has been criticised for its lack of application to the study of multiracialism as discussed by the authors, and the lack of a thorough application of Foucaultian thought to the field of race studies.
Abstract: C little current criticism of Foucauldian racial theory exists, primarily because Foucault never formulated a full-blown racial theory. Some critics, such as Robert J.C. Young and Ann Laura Stoler, have successfully used Foucauldian principles to inform their views of race studies. Foucault himself said little directly pertaining to race studies, admits Young: “Foucault had a lot to say about power, but he was curiously circumspect about the ways in which it has operated in the arenas of race and colonialism. His virtual silence on these issues is striking” (57).1 This silence does not deter Young and a few other critics from extrapolating Foucauldian thought into various areas of race studies. Young focuses his discussion on racism; he evaluates Foucauldian influence on colonial studies, particularly on Edward Said’s Orientalism, before applying Foucauldian commentary on ethnology, power, and sexuality to a theory of racism.2 Like Young, Ann Laura Stoler relies heavily on Foucault’s History of Sexuality in her applications of Foucault to colonial studies. Stoler has authored two of the more extensive explorations of Foucauldian thought as it pertains to race studies, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things and Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Both of these works deal with race primarily in the context of sexuality in colonialism, neglecting the larger picture of Foucault and racial identity. One element that has been noticeably lacking in the theory thus far is a thorough application of Foucault to the study of multiracialism.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors use adoption to ironize the assumption that race can secure the permanence and sameness of selfhood, which is a recurring figure that interests prominent writers such as Charles Chesnutt and William Faulkner.
Abstract: T adopted child of uncertain or unknown race is a seldom-noticed but recurring figure that interests prominent writers such as Charles Chesnutt and William Faulkner.1 As highlighted in the epigraphs, both writers dramatize the anxieties of racial individuation—what it means to emerge as a separate and undivided entity—through their adopted orphans. Donald Glover asks “Am I not still a Negro?” when he finds out that he was adopted. Joe Christmas’s famous line about the possibility of being part-Negro—“If I’m not, damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time”—follows his admission that he does not know who his biological parents are. These passages use adoption to ironize the assumption that race can secure the permanence and sameness of selfhood. Here, racial identification is profoundly unsettling because it raises the problem of the continuity of self—the sameness of identity over time: “Am I not still a Negro?”; “If I’m not, damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time.” For these characters, mixed-race adoption posits that race is something that changes from one moment to the next. In Chesnutt’s novel, race may change depending on who adopts.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the liberal tradition, justice and identity appear both difficult to relate and inextricably intertwined as mentioned in this paper, which makes it difficult for people to relate to each other in a practical way.
Abstract: F the liberal tradition , justice and identity appear both difficult to relate and inextricably intertwined. After years of contestatory identity politics, liberalism still proffers Americans a paradoxical national ideology that construes these terms as mutually exclusive. Identity, prejudice, and discrimination stand opposed to universality, equity, and freedom. Liberalism’s central tenet, reaffirmed from Locke through Kant, to Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Rawls, holds that justice dissolves all particularities before a universally shared and immanent lawfulness. Even Emerson’s most ethereal affirmations rhyme with liberalism’s core beliefs. “Within man,” as he wrote in “The Over-Soul,” is “the soul of the whole” (386). Emerson’s affirmation that each particular individual participates in the “transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest law” may express a religious sentiment, but a similar belief in lawful and impersonal universality also grounds liberal ideals of secular justice. Emerson’s identification with such beliefs makes him, as Stanley Cavell and others have affirmed, a founding figure of American thought. Moreover, these beliefs have a practical aspect. Emerson himself, only a few years after “The Over-Soul” appeared in print, took the stage to speak out against the injustices of slavery. His long participation in the abolitionist movement stands as an immanent expression of his transcendentalist ideals applied to particular problems of justice.1 Of course, the history of the modern world generally and the history of the United States particularly make clear that difficulties attend the practical achievement of liberal universalism however possible

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the introduction of Cotton Mather's The Christian Philosopher as discussed by the authors, the author used the Tale of Hayy Ibn Yaqdan (1110-1185) as a model for his ideal Christian philosopher.
Abstract: A enigmatic figure from a twelfth-century SpanishArabic Islamic philosophical romance, Hayy ibn Yaqdan, makes an even more enigmatic appearance, circa 1700, in the introduction to Cotton Mather’s The Christian Philosopher: A Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature with Religious Improvements. While we hardly expect the notorious prosecutor of witches to write favorably—in even the remotest corner of Mather’s “egocentric universe” (Parrington 107)—of a literary symbol from what he viewed as an infidel culture, at least a few special readers from the New England Company and the Royal Society would have been familiar with Ibn Tufayl’s (1110–1185) masterpiece, The Tale of Hayy Ibn Yaqdan and as surprised as we are to find Mather alluding to it admiringly as a model for his ideal Christian philosopher.1 Appropriating a literary gem written by an Islamic philosopher from Medieval Andalusia for a late seventeenth-century transatlantic readership, Mather prepares that unique reader for an unusual line of development by giving the Islamic masterpiece primary rhetorical position at the very head of his Christian Philosopher, a work he hoped would stand as his opus magnum and as the final word on New World natural science.2 That a unique Medieval Islamic literary figure is made to serve as a threshold to the seventeenth-century New England Puritan’s New World “summa” of natural science is strong evidence not only of the epistemological complexity of Mather’s New England at the turn


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The contemporary American naturalist Annie Dillard locates her voice using the framework of nineteenth-century American transcendentalism, and specifically Emersonian pantheism; she seeks knowledge, inspiration, and even identity from an impersonal nature coded predominantly as male as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: T her putatively “documentary” works, the contemporary American naturalist Annie Dillard locates her voice using the framework of nineteenth-century American transcendentalism, and specifically Emersonian pantheism; she seeks knowledge, inspiration, and even identity from an impersonal nature coded predominantly as male. In Dillard’s writing, pantheism functions as a discourse of exclusively male merger with nature, leaving her protagonist in a closed system where the endless transformation of pre-existing bodies supplants sexual reproduction. In some ways, Dillard even wants figuratively to transcend or erase her own voice and body and replace them with those of an explicitly male nature; this desire is foregrounded in her Emersonian wariness of all forms of self-consciousness. Even when the subject of Dillard’s text is Dillard—as in the autobiographical An