’Crossing a Bare Common’: Emerson’s Ironic Negotiation of the Sublime

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Abstract

This paper deals with the notion of the American sublime and thus carries on an already ongoing debate, which in recent years has reached its highpoint in Harold Bloom’s strongly affirmative remarks on the subject. In this paper, I shall focus on the perhaps most well-known attempt to discuss the possibility of sublimity in an American context, namely the one found in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The main claim of this paper is that Emerson’s version of the American sublime represents a negotiating of the European and not least English romantic development within the tradition of writing and thinking about the sublime. To put it very simply, this means to present a version of the sublime in which transcendence is transposed ‘into a naturalistic key’ – to use Thomas Weiskel’s apt phrase. Admittedly, this is hardly a new, nor a very original way of situating Emerson’s sublime. Here I follow a number of predecessors – among them most notably Harold Bloom, but also more recently Eric Wilson’s book Emerson’s Sublime Science (1999).

A prominent feature of Emerson’s discourse of the sublime – also noted by Bloom and Wilson – is his ‘protusive’ rhetoric (Bloom). A widespread tendency exists among Emerson critics to construe his exorbitant rhetorical style as somehow perfectly conducive to achieving the sense of transcendence that his effort to convey an American’s experience of the sublime would have to involve. Characteristically, Emerson’s highly charged eloquence on the sublime is more often than not described as a ‘sublime rhetoric’. From the stock of rhetorical tropes the most favoured by Emerson and picked out as the trademark of his rhetorical sublimity critics mention in particular his use of hyperbole, chiasmus and metalepsis. Common to all three tropes is said to be their ability on the rhetorical level to accomplish the kind of crossing into transcendence that describes the sublime experience on the thematic level of Emerson’s texts.

The second main claim of my paper, however, is to propose that Emerson does not use these tropes in an unreserved apotheosis of the sublime. Though acknowledging Bloom’s point that Emerson’s American sublime is achieved in an agon with English Romantic poetry, I shall demonstrate that his sublime rhetoric is much more circumspect than is usually recognized by his critics, including Bloom. Not least shall I analyse the manner in which his blustering rhetoric of crossing – notably through the figures of hyperbole, chiasmus and metalepsis – represents a kind of double talk, where its assertions of sublimity are made ironically so as to suggest their potentially self-cancelling nature. In this context I shall investigate some of the paratextual and intertextual framing devices used by Emerson in order to question the authority of his own discourse. Among those of most importance will be included ones such as warped allusions to classic sublime texts, the choice of the essay genre in preference to the poetic genre, the use of epigraphs, the use of personae and aliases as mouthpieces for the expression of the sublime, etc. Thus I hope to tell another less authoritative story of American Transcendentalism than a certain tradition of Emerson criticism has told. In order to contextualize my reading I shall consider echoes of Emerson’s ironic and self-critical sublime in two of his heirs, Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens.

The theoretical framework of my discussion in this paper will draw on various critical and theoretical works on the status of the sublime in the Romantic period and in an American literary context. Central works will include Thomas Weiskel’s The Romantic Sublime (1976), Harold Bloom’s Agon: A Theory of Revisionism (1982) and Ruin the Sacred Truths (1989) and Jan Rosiek’s magisterial Maintaining the Sublime: Heidegger and Adorno (2000).
OriginalsprogEngelsk
Publikationsdato2005
Antal sider6
StatusUdgivet - 2005
BegivenhedThe 19th Biannual Nordic Association of American Studies Conference - Växjö University/Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona/Swedish Emigrant Institute in Växjö, Växjö/Karlskrona, Sverige
Varighed: 25 maj 200528 maj 2005
Konferencens nummer: 19

Konference

KonferenceThe 19th Biannual Nordic Association of American Studies Conference
Nummer19
LokationVäxjö University/Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona/Swedish Emigrant Institute in Växjö
Land/OmrådeSverige
ByVäxjö/Karlskrona
Periode25/05/0528/05/05

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