Branka Arsić is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Branka Arsić’s On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson is an intellectual feast… Arsić calls herself an ‘archaeologist of Emerson’s thinking,’ no easy task considering not just the amount of Emerson’s writing (the journals alone run to sixteen volumes) but its relentless idiosyncrasy… Arsić makes Emerson into one of the great nineteenth-century moderns… It is no exaggeration to say that On Leaving will take its place among the benchmarks of Emerson scholarship of the past hundred years… One can’t help but be captivated by Arsić’s archaeology. And even if we remain (alertly, admiringly) skeptical about the idea of winding Emerson’s unruly intelligence around a single idea, that doesn’t make this book any less fun to read or any less essential.

Branka Arsić is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Branka Arsić’s On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson is an intellectual feast… Arsić calls herself an ‘archaeologist of Emerson’s thinking,’ no easy task considering not just the amount of Emerson’s writing (the journals alone run to sixteen volumes) but its relentless idiosyncrasy… Arsić makes Emerson into one of the great nineteenth-century moderns… It is no exaggeration to say that On Leaving will take its place among the benchmarks of Emerson scholarship of the past hundred years… One can’t help but be captivated by Arsić’s archaeology. And even if we remain (alertly, admiringly) skeptical about the idea of winding Emerson’s unruly intelligence around a single idea, that doesn’t make this book any less fun to read or any less essential.

Branka Arsić is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Branka Arsić’s On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson is an intellectual feast… Arsić calls herself an ‘archaeologist of Emerson’s thinking,’ no easy task considering not just the amount of Emerson’s writing (the journals alone run to sixteen volumes) but its relentless idiosyncrasy… Arsić makes Emerson into one of the great nineteenth-century moderns… It is no exaggeration to say that On Leaving will take its place among the benchmarks of Emerson scholarship of the past hundred years… One can’t help but be captivated by Arsić’s archaeology. And even if we remain (alertly, admiringly) skeptical about the idea of winding Emerson’s unruly intelligence around a single idea, that doesn’t make this book any less fun to read or any less essential.