by James Marcus
More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness.
This Emerson is a rebel. He is also a lover, a friend, a husband, and a father. Having declared his great topic to be “the infinitude of the private man,” he is nonetheless an intensely social being who develops Transcendentalism in the company of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Theodore Parker. And although he resists political activism early on—hoping instead for a revolution in consciousness—the burning issue of slavery ultimately transforms him from cloistered metaphysician to fiery abolitionist.
Drawing on telling episodes from Emerson’s life alongside landmark essays like “Self-Reliance,” “Experience,” and “Circles,” Glad to the Brink of Fear reveals how Emerson shares our preoccupations with fate and freedom, race and inequality, love and grief. It shows, too, how his desire to see the world afresh, rather than accepting the consensus view, is a lesson that never grows old.
James Marcus was born in the literary hotbed of Paterson, NJ, and grew up in the New York area. He is the author of "Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut" and a half-dozen translations from the Italian, the most recent being Giacomo Casanova's "The Duel." His work has appeared many publications, including the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Salon, the Nation, Raritan, the Paris Review, and the Village Voice, and his essay "Faint Music" was selected for "Best American Essays 2009."
He is Deputy Editor at Harper's Magazine, after a three-year tenure at the Columbia Journalism Review. He blogs about books, music, and miscellaneous stuff at House of Mirth. A collection of essays from CJR called "Second Read," which he edited and introduced, will be published by Columbia University Press in November.
Princeton University Press
ISBN-13 978-0691254333
No comments:
Post a Comment