Of rhetoric, truth, and the times: Steps towards an Emersonian criticism

This dissertation does not purport to accomplish a reading of Emerson, or represent the constative content of his work. It does present itself as prolegomena to a reading of early Emerson, and in particular, Emerson's Nature, by performing a series of critical steps, all of which concern the topics of rhetoric, truth, and the conceivable construction of the topoi of the times more familiarly known as history. Its method and mode is critically paratactic: designed as a series of intellectual essays linked by its own peculiar logic, its form is a sort of hybrid of the independendent essay and philosophic treatise. The series of pieces works to bridge the gap between three terms: the systematic reasoning classically characteristic of philosophy, the rhetorical parataxis of Emerson's journal and essay writing, and certain critical insights associated with contemporary theory.After the propaedeutic analytic of the first chapter, the body of the dissertation enacts a series of intellectual steps leading from de Man to Emerson. Chapter 2, building upon the epistemologic problematics analysed in the first chapter, reads a crucial passage from his well-known essay "Resistance to Theory," aiming to expose the peculiar way de Manian theory--in particular, his rejection of the category of "the aesthetic--keeps criticism locked in the trap of the very episteme it religiously resists. Chapter 3 suggests one theoretical move that may help break the frame of classic episteme-logics, and furnishes a critical correlate for the peculiarly rhetorical emphasis of Emerson's intellectual initiatives. Drawing upon passages from Emerson's "Lecture on the Times," Chapter 4 expands on a few rhetorical figures, trying to turn rhetoric into a theory of reading that does not (as in de Man) close poetry and criticism off from history. The last chapter endeavors to exemplify the way that reading and writing rhetoric effectively engages history. An instance of criticism qua mimesis, it codes "Emerson criticism" as a transformative assimiliation of his rhetoric, style, and principle motifs.