American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron

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).

• PrefaceIntroductionChapter 1: James D. Lilley, University at Albany, SUNY, USA – Being Singularly Impersonal: Jonathan Edwards and the Aesthetics of ConsentChapter 2: Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt University, USA – Melville’s Creatures, or Seeing OtherwiseChapter 3: Paul Grimstad, Yale University, USA – On Ecstasy: Sharon Cameron’s Reading of EmersonChapter 4: Johannes Voelz, Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt, Germany – The Recognition of Emerson’s Impersonal: Reading Alternatives in Sharon CameronChapter 5: Vesna Kuiken, Columbia University, USA – On the Matter of Thinking: Margaret Fuller’s Beautiful WorkChapter 6: George Kateb, Princeton University, USA – Reading NatureChapter 7: Branka Arsic, Columbia University, USA – What Music Shall We Have? Thoreau on the Aesthetics and Politics of ListeningChapter 8: Kerry Larson, University of Michigan, USA – Hawthorne’s Fictional Commitments: The Early TalesChapter 9: Theo Davis, Northeastern University, USA – Hawthorne’s Rage: On Form and the DharmaChapter 10: Shira Wolosky, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel – Formal, New, and Relational Aesthetics: Dickinson's MultitextsChapter 11: Michael Moon, Emory University, USA – Beyond Sense: Portraits and Objects in Henry James’s Late WritingsChapter 12: Shari Goldberg, University of Texas at Dallas, USA - Believing in Maud-Evelyn: Henry James and the Obligation to GhostsChapter 13: Mark Noble, Georgia State University, USA – The Ends of Imagination: Stevens’ ImpersonalNote on ContributorsIndex

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.