Description

Book Synopsis
Miles of Stare explores the problem of nineteenth-century American literary vision: the strange conflation of visible reality and poetic language that emerges repeatedly in the metaphors and literary creations of American transcendentalists. The strangeness of nineteenth-century poetic vision is exemplified most famously by Emerson's transparent eyeball. That disembodied, omniscient seer is able to shed its body and transcend sight paradoxically in order to see - not to create - poetic language manifest on the American landscape. In Miles of Stare, Michelle Kohler explores the question of why, given American transcendentalism's anti-empiricism, the movement's central trope becomes an eye purged of imagination. And why, furthermore, she asks, despite its insistent empiricism, is this notorious eye also so decidedly not an eye? What are the ethics of casting a boldly equivocal metaphor as the source of a national literature amidst a national landscape fraught with slavery, genocide, po

Miles of Stare Transcendentalism and the Problem

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    A Hardback by Michelle Kohler

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      Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
      Publication Date: 6/30/2014 12:00:00 AM
      ISBN13: 9780817318352, 978-0817318352
      ISBN10: 0817318356
      Also in:
      ELT & Literary Studies Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      Miles of Stare explores the problem of nineteenth-century American literary vision: the strange conflation of visible reality and poetic language that emerges repeatedly in the metaphors and literary creations of American transcendentalists. The strangeness of nineteenth-century poetic vision is exemplified most famously by Emerson's transparent eyeball. That disembodied, omniscient seer is able to shed its body and transcend sight paradoxically in order to see - not to create - poetic language manifest on the American landscape. In Miles of Stare, Michelle Kohler explores the question of why, given American transcendentalism's anti-empiricism, the movement's central trope becomes an eye purged of imagination. And why, furthermore, she asks, despite its insistent empiricism, is this notorious eye also so decidedly not an eye? What are the ethics of casting a boldly equivocal metaphor as the source of a national literature amidst a national landscape fraught with slavery, genocide, po

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