Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor

Description

Metaphors are ubiquitous and yet-or, for that very reason-go largely unseen. We are all variously susceptible to a blindness or blurry vision of metaphors; yet even when they are seen clearly, we are left to situate the ambiguities, conflations and contradictions they regularly present-logically, aesthetically and morally. David LaRocca's book serves as a set of 'reminders' of certain features of the natural history of our language-especially the tropes that permeate and define it. As part of his investigation, LaRocca turns to Ralph Waldo Emerson's only book on a single topic, English Traits (1856), which teems with genealogical and generative metaphors-blood, birth, plants, parents, family, names and race. In the first book-length study of English Traits in over half a century, LaRocca considers the presence of metaphors in Emerson's fertile text-a unique work in his expansive corpus, and one that is regularly overlooked. As metaphors are encountered in Emerson's book, and drawn from a long history of usage in work by others, a reader may realize (or remember) what is inherent and encoded in our language, but rarely seen: how metaphors circulate in speech and through texts to become the lifeblood of thought.

David LaRocca (Ph.D., Vanderbilt) is Writer-in-Residence in the F. L. Allen Room at the New York Public Library and Fellow at the Moving Picture Institute in New York. Author of On Emerson (2003), editor of Stanley Cavell's Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (2003) and Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell (2013), he was Harvard's Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellow in the United Kingdom, and consultant to the American Museum of Natural History, during the composition of this book.

This immensely learned, deeply thoughtful and far-ranging book helps re-situate Emerson in his own time, and in ours. More than just a work of scholarship, it rises to the level of philosophical investigation. It is also witty, playful and, in its own strange way, original. -- Phillip Lopate, editor of Writing New York and The Art of the Personal Essay Emerson suggests in 'The American Scholar' that the final value of a book is that it is a resource. Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of the Metaphor is a resourceful and generative book, full of disparate insights and insinuations that future scholars will take up in reassessing the relevance of English Traits in an increasingly transatlantic field ... In making a new case for the philosophical sophistication of English Traits, LaRocca has achieved his own Emersonian feat, the creation of a new 'atmosphere in which to think' (140). -- Jason Risinger, The Ohio State University * American Literary History * I imagine David LaRocca having fun composing this book ... [I]t is an engaging experiment in criticism, an attempt to perform literary study in such a way as to bring its subject to life ... He has inventively devised a cabinet-like structure for his own book on Emerson's cabinet-like structures; LaRocca sets about, assiduously and artfully, composing, gathering, sequencing and otherwise curating its contents ... The patient reader, the reader willing to make "interpretive shifts," a reader capable of "loyalty to the present" and of reinforcing "an openness to the complexity of emerging phenomena," will find [the] atmosphere by turns exhilarating, confusing, enticing, and drowsy with the hum of bees. Nevertheless, the reader must grant that removing Emerson's writing from a museum and placing it in a florilegium does wonders for its constitution. * Journal of American Studies, 49, E15, reviewed by T. S. McMillin, Oberlin College, USA * With this study, LaRocca emerges as a theorist as well as an important scholar of Emerson in an age when "theory" has become a footnote ... This study should be read by those who think themselves comfortable with Emerson, and by those who feel abandoned by theory. Mostly, though, this should be read by those who are in interested in figuring the thought that lies beyond reach. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. * Choice, reviewed by R. T. Prus, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, USA * David LaRocca treats Emerson's English Traits with the philosophical seriousness and sophistication the book has long deserved, but never before so richly received. In elegant numbered paragraphs of subtle, self-reflexive philosophical prose, LaRocca refracts a selection of the book's principal metaphors through a remarkably wide array of related texts ranging from Seneca to Augustine to Darwin, Nietzsche, and, especially, Wittgenstein. The result is not a conventional academic study, but rather a many-faceted Emersonian reflection by quotation on such topics as evolution, originality, liberalism, American identity, self-renaming, and the fecund nature of metaphor itself. This is a valuable contribution to the re-assessment of Emerson's most neglected work, and a distinctive example of creative hermeneutical engagement. -- Neal Dolan, Assistant Professor of English, University of Toronto, Canada In this elegantly written, scrupulously researched book, David La Rocca has convincingly demonstrated that, rather than locating a restricted area of inquiry, Natural History constitutes the grounding precondition for Emersonian thinking. Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor will surely prove an indispensable reference for undergraduates and graduates alike. -- Donald E. Pease, Professor of English and The Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Dartmouth College, USA In this wonderful book, David LaRocca illuminates Emerson's mind by, in effect, pursuing his methods. LaRocca's treatment of English Traits is no mere academic summary. Rather, his object is to conduct his own natural history of metaphor, with a view to illuminating the role of metaphor, both for Emerson and more generally, in welding disjointed 'naturalistic' observations into coherent and intelligible wholes. With a vast range of reference, running from Wittgenstein to Darwin and from Coleridge to Montaigne, and an engagingly 'album'-like structure, the book traces Emersonian connections between topics as remote as the origins of evolutionary theory, the making of commonplace books and the rise of the American anti-slavery movement. It offers a glitteringly many-sided examination of the evolution of Emerson's deeply creative mind in its efforts to arrive at an understanding, not only of England, but also of the nascent American culture that it was in process of helping to form. -- Bernard Harrison, Emeritus E. E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy, University of Utah, USA, and Emeritus Professor of the Humanities, University of Sussex, UK In this finely crafted and highly original piece of scholarship, LaRocca not only draws attention to one of the most neglected texts in Emerson's oeuvre, he also presents an extended and insightful meditation on the nature of metaphor and the formation of cultural identity. Like a true florilegium, the collection of remarks continuously surprises-but not with gimmicks, rather with the kind of uncanny observations the method of criticism and arrangement is meant to illuminate. Combining literary sensibility with philosophical acumen, Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor also prompts urgent and serious reflection on the relation between literature, philosophy and natural science more generally. Its publication is, therefore, as timely as Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations, and should be greeted with just as much applause. -- Mario von der Ruhr, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Swansea University, Wales, and Associate Editor of the journal Philosophical Investigations