American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron

Description

American Impersonal brings together some of the most influential scholars now working in American literature to explore the impact of one of America's leading literary critics: Sharon Cameron. It engages directly with certain arguments that Cameron has articulated throughout her career, most notably her late work on the question of impersonality. In doing so, it provides responses to questions fundamental to literary criticism, such as: the nature of personhood; the logic of subjectivity in depersonalized communities; the question of the human within the problematic of the impersonal; how impersonality relates to the "posthuman." Additionally, some essays respond to the current "aesthetic turn" in literary scholarship and engage with the lyric, currently much debated, as well as the larger questions of poetics and the logic of genre. These crucial issues are addressed from the perspective of an American literary and philosophical tradition, and progress chronologically, starting from Melville and Emerson and moving via Dickinson, Thoreau and Hawthorne to Henry James and Wallace Stevens. This historical perspective adds the appeal of revisiting the American nineteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition, and even rewriting it.

Branka Arsic is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, USA. She is the author of On Leaving, A Reading in Emerson (2010) and The Passive Constitutions, 71/2 Times Bartleby (2007). She has co-edited (with Cary Wolfe) a collection of essays on Emerson, entitled The Other Emerson (2001).

A book with its eye on the future of American literary studies rather than its past. It proposes nothing less than a fundamental revision of the American intellectual tradition, and the readings it offers provide myriad opportunities to reinterpret the place of American literature in its social, political, and historical milieu. -- Benjamin Pickford * U.S. Studies Online * Coiling and uncoiling, at once lucid and unrecognizable, these essays turn what is marvelous in Sharon Cameron into a collective marvel. -- Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English & American Studies, Yale University, USA A remarkable-and remarkably diverse-collection of essays that registers the singular influence of Sharon Cameron's unique body of work on how we read, and write about, American literature. The very spine of that canon-from Edwards to Melville, Emerson and Dickinson to James, Stevens and more-is represented here in readings that call upon us to reimagine the ethics of literature and aesthetic experience in light of Cameron's searching meditations on the "impersonal." -- Cary Wolfe, Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English, Rice University, USA A book with its eye on the future of American literary studies rather than its past. It proposes nothing less than a fundamental revision of the American intellectual tradition, and the readings it offers provide myriad opportunities to reinterpret the place of American literature in its social, political, and historical milieu. -- Benjamin Pickford, University of Nottingham, UK * U.S. Studies Online *