Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes
Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes

Author: Stanley Cavell

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780804745437

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This book is Stanley Cavell’s definitive expression on Emerson. Over the past thirty years, Cavell has demonstrated that he is the most emphatic and provocative philosophical critic of Emerson that America has yet known. The sustained effort of that labor is drawn together here for the first time into a single volume, which also contains two previously unpublished essays and an introduction by Cavell that reflects on this book and the history of its emergence. Students and scholars working in philosophy, literature, American studies, history, film studies, and political theory can now more easily access Cavell’s luminous and enduring work on Emerson. Such engagement should be further complemented by extensive indices and annotations. If we are still in doubt whether America has expressed itself philosophically, there is perhaps no better space for inquiry than reading Cavell reading Emerson.

Doctrine and Difference
Doctrine and Difference

Author: Michael J. Colacurcio

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-29

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 100039350X

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Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature aims to expand and deepen the inquiry begun in the volume from 2007. Beginning with an essay on the avowedly Puritan poetry of Anne Bradstreet and ending with two not-quite-secular novels from late in the 19th century, this volume seeks to uncover the religious and philosophical meanings deeply embedded in so much of 19th century American literature, and then, importantly, to identify and analyze the techniques by which the "doctrines" are differentiated into imaginative literature. Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville—and yes, even Howells and James—are driven by powerful thematic intentions. But they do not preach: they dramatize. And, as they talk their way through their existential issues, they often talk to one another: yes, no, maybe, ok but not so fast. Stressing the idea of a shared, poet-Puritan inheritance, the new Doctrine and Difference means to re-confirm the vitality of literary history and, in particular, the importance of reading the classic texts of American literature in context and in relation.

Shades of the Planet
Shades of the Planet

Author: Wai Chee Dimock

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0691188254

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In a globalizing age, studying American literature in isolation from the rest of the world seems less and less justified. But is the conceptual box of the nation dispensable? And what would American literature look like without it?Leading scholars take up this debate in Shades of the Planet, beginning not with the United States as center, but with the world as circumference. This reversed frame yields a surprising landscape, alive with traces of West Africa, Eastern Europe, Iran, Iraq, India, China, Mexico, and Australia. The Broadway musical Oklahoma! has aboriginal antecedents; Black English houses an African syntax; American slavery consorts with the Holocaust; Philip Roth keeps company with Milan Kundera; the crime novel moves south of the border; and R. P. Blackmur lectures in Japan. A national literature becomes haunted by the world when that literature is seen extending to the Pacific, opening up to Islam, and accompanying African-American authors as they travel. Highlighting American literature as a fold in a planet-wide fabric, this pioneering volume transforms the field, redrawing its institutional as well as geographical map.The contributors are Rachel Adams, Jonathan Arac, Homi K. Bhabha, Lawrence Buell, Wai Chee Dimock, Susan Stanford Friedman, Paul Giles, David Palumbo-Liu, Ross Posnock, Joseph Roach, and Eric J. Sundquist.

Language, Form(s) of Life, and Logic
Language, Form(s) of Life, and Logic

Author: Christian Martin

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-09-10

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 3110518287

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This volume deals with the connection between thinking-and-speaking and our form(s) of life. All contributions engage with Wittgenstein’s approach to this topic. As a whole, the volume takes a stance against both biological and ethnological interpretations of the notion "form of life" and seeks to promote a broadly logico-linguistic understanding instead. The structure of this book is threefold. Part one focuses on lines of thinking that lead from Wittgenstein’s earlier thought to the concept of form of life in his later work. Contributions to part two examine the concrete philosophical function of this notion as well as the ways in which it differs from cognate concepts. Contributions to part three put Wittgenstein’s notion of form of life in perspective by relating it to phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy and problems in contemporary analytic philosophy.

Emerson as Philosopher
Emerson as Philosopher

Author: Richard Gilmore

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-05-31

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 303132546X

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This book considers the role of postmodernism (skepticism towards metanarratives and anti-essentialism) in Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy by putting it in conversation with key 20th and 21st century thinkers such as Beauvoir, Coates, Derrida, Paz, Rorty, and Zizek. Postmodern Emerson shows how Emersonian skepticism to metanarratives such as sexism, racism, Beauvoiran "serious values," and others, can help us face some of society's gravest contemporary social and philosophical challenges. Methodologically, the book exemplifies Emersonian postmodernism by defying traditional philosophical metanarratives about the difference between high and low culture or serious and ridiculous subjects, and Emerson with what would seem to be his opposite. This is itself a postmodern gesture, breaking rules of genre and topic to make unlikely but interesting connections. Above all, this book proves that in this time of social division and widespread despair, Emerson can help.

Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds
Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds

Author: Cary Wolfe

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-04-17

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 022668802X

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The poems of Wallace Stevens teem with birds: grackles, warblers, doves, swans, nightingales, owls, peacocks, and one famous blackbird who summons thirteen ways of looking. What do Stevens’s evocations of birds, and his poems more generally, tell us about the relationship between human and nonhuman? In this book, the noted theorist of posthumanism Cary Wolfe argues for a philosophical and theoretical reinvention of ecological poetics, using Stevens as a test case. Stevens, Wolfe argues, is an ecological poet in the sense that his places, worlds, and environments are co-created by the life forms that inhabit them. Wolfe argues for a “nonrepresentational” conception of ecopoetics, showing how Stevens’s poems reward study alongside theories of system, environment, and observation derived from a multitude of sources, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Niklas Luhmann to Jacques Derrida and Stuart Kauffman. Ecological Poetics is an ambitious interdisciplinary undertaking involving literary criticism, contemporary philosophy, and theoretical biology.

Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation
Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation

Author: Paul Standish

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-02-28

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1786602911

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Translation exposes aspects of language that can easily be ignored, renewing the sense of the proximity and inseparability of language and thought. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature was an early expression of a self-understanding of philosophy that has, in some quarters at least, survived the centuries. This book explores the idea of translation as a philosophical theme and as an important feature of philosophy and practical life, especially in relation to the work of Stanley Cavell. The essays in this volume explore philosophical questions about translation, especially in the light of the work of Stanley Cavell. They take the questions raised by translation to be of key importance not only for philosophical thinking but for our lives as a whole. Thoreau’s enigmatic remark “The truth is translated” reveals that apparently technical matters of translation extend through human lives to remarkable effect, conditioning the ways in which the world comes to light. The experience of the translator exemplifies the challenge of judgement where governing rules and principles are incommensurable; and it shows something of the ways in which words come to us, opening new possibilities of thought. This book puts Cavell’s rich exploration of these matters into conversation with traditions of pragmatism and European thought. Translation, then, far from a merely technical matter, is at work in human being, and it is the means of humanisation. The book brings together philosophers and translators with common interests in Cavell and in the questions of language at the heart of his work.

Directions in Mathematical Systems Theory and Optimization
Directions in Mathematical Systems Theory and Optimization

Author: Anders Rantzer

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2003-07-01

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 3540361065

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For more than three decades, Anders Lindquist has delivered fundamental cont- butions to the ?elds of systems, signals and control. Throughout this period, four themes can perhaps characterize his interests: Modeling, estimation and ?ltering, feedback and robust control. His contributions to modeling include seminal work on the role of splitting subspaces in stochastic realization theory, on the partial realization problem for both deterministic and stochastic systems, on the solution of the rational covariance extension problem and on system identi?cation. His contributions to ?ltering and estimation include the development of fast ?ltering algorithms, leading to a nonlinear dynamical system which computes spectral factors in its steady state, and which provide an alternate, linear in the dimension of the state space, to computing the Kalman gain from a matrix Riccati equation. His further research on the phase portrait of this dynamical system gave a better understanding of when the Kalman ?lter will converge, answering an open question raised by Kalman. While still a student he established the separation principle for stochastic function differential equations, including some fundamental work on optimal control for stochastic systems with time lags. He continued his interest in feedback control by deriving optimal and robust control feedback laws for suppressing the effects of harmonic disturbances. Moreover, his recent work on a complete parameterization of all rational solutions to the Nevanlinna-Pick problem is providing a new approach to robust control design.

Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Author: Thomas Constantinesco

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 019285559X

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Offers new readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Alice James. Demonstrates how pain generates literary language and shapes individual and collective identities. Examines how nineteenth-century US literature mobilizes and challenges sentimentalism as a response to the problem of pain. Uses sustained close reading to illuminate the theoretical and historical work of literature.