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Original Relations: Pantheism, Intertextuality, and an American Renaissance Aesthetic
Abstract
The dissertation uses "original relations" in two senses: in an overarching sense to indicate the writing project of the American Renaissance, the narrative/lyric practice (relating), and in a restrictive sense to indicate one element of the aesthetic, Emerson's project for alignment with the universe. From the intertextuality among writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman, a cluster of topics emerges with stylistic implications, contributing to an aesthetic. The elements of this aesthetic are original relations, a rhetoric of fullness, a quest for unity, extra-vagance (the hyphenated term from Walden defamiliarizes the idea of extravagance, and tilts our perception toward a physical act of wandering beyond), contradiction, and magnificent failure. A major linguistic task of original relations in the larger sense is an engagement with inherited language, a breaking of forms. An important effect of the aesthetic is the transformation of assumptions of members of a majority establishment into perspectives of an alienated minority. A pantheistic cosmology as an image-forming absence or presence is one of the occasions for the conversation among the texts. A major problem in the intertextual conversation is the dilemma that the limits of epistemology place on ontology—of understanding the limits of seeming and being, and the double consciousness that artists develop to deal with this dilemma. Double consciousness allows minds to balance two orders of discourse in the vehicle of writing. The aesthetic discussed exists in interstices and penumbras among the elements, so the terms of the discussion overlap categories. By discovering that Emerson and Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe inhabit a common textual language more than they inhabit opposite philosophies, this project decenters existing critical gravity.
Subject Area
American literature
Recommended Citation
Rodman, Isaac P, "Original Relations: Pantheism, Intertextuality, and an American Renaissance Aesthetic" (1989). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9011786.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9011786