The birth of a style: Emerson and the writing of the moment in the American Renaissance (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Up until quite recently, Emerson criticism has been the terrain of thematic preoccupations not quite able to figure out a legitimate way of encountering Emerson's writings and their discursive difficulty. The problem I explore in this thesis about Emerson and the writings of the so-called American Renaissance is the question of style: how to explain that strange difficulty of reading American writings, especially Emerson's often incomprehensible style of essay. Philosophical, rather than historical, problems of reading and writing are the focus of my quest for the conditions of possibility of the literary essay and of writing in general. The historicality of Emerson's essay is also analyzed as a task of transfiguring the idea of America in such a singular style of writing in mid 19th century America.; In the Prologue, I re-configure and change the critical terms for intervention into the on-going debates in Emerson criticism. Defining style in ways such that it, being neither a thematic keyword nor a stylistic password, can lay bare the process of the text's auto production, I trace the way a certain text produces its own conditions of intelligibility. I also find that the discursive conditions of possibility in Emerson's essay and poetry present themselves only in their off-structural quasi-philosophicality.; In Chapter Two, I try to think through various Emerson images in Emerson criticism and discern a hitherto little known profile of Emerson. In reading Emerson, it becomes more and more clear that a lot of critical misunderstandings have largely been caused by our conventionalized way of interpretation. Rather than searching for an answer to what an Emerson essay is about, I read his essays as a question about our interpretative and representational thinking in general.; Chapter Three propounds the cardinal importance of the seminal essay “Experience” in Emerson's idea of the essay as an act of questioning. “Experience” is a rare piece confronting philosophical thinking as well as Emerson's own early romantic idealization of literature and poetry. Emerson transfigures the death of his son into a cultural event in the discovery of America. I call such a transformative aspect of his essay by the term “writing of the moment.”; The fourth Chapter assesses the cultural implications of Emerson's writing in terms of his idea of cultural re-appropriation and the criticism of culture. Focusing on Emerson's later essays, I explicate his notion of quotation as a major challenge to the discourses of American originality then and now. The genre hybridity and discursive heterogeneity of his essay are the two key motifs that link him to the fictions of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, specifically to their quasi-philosophical conception of fictionality in “The Custom-House” and the so-called “cetological chapters.”; In the Epilogue, I adumbrate some remaining issues concerning the present significance of Emerson's idea of literature and philosophy and their mutual transformation. Emerson's quasi-philosophicality proves to be a signal way of configuring the fictionality of writing in general, and especially of Emerson's complex relation to Pragmatism and its philosophicality.