critically analyse the essay american scholar

Emerson's Essays

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature Notes
About The American Scholar
Ralph Waldo Emerson Biography
Summary and Analysis of Nature
About Nature
Introduction
Summary and Analysis of The American Scholar
Paragraphs 1-7
Paragraphs 8-9
Paragraphs 10-20
Paragraphs 21-30
Paragraphs 31-45
Summary and Analysis of The Over-Soul
About The Over-Soul
Paragraphs 1-3
Paragraphs 4-10
Paragraphs 11-15
Paragraphs 16-21
Paragraphs 22-30
Summary and Analysis of Self-Reliance
About Self-Reliance
Paragraphs 1-17
Paragraphs 18-32
Paragraphs 33-50
Summary and Analysis of The Transcendentalist
About The Transcendentalist
Paragraphs 1-5
Paragraphs 6-14
Paragraphs 15-30
Summary and Analysis of The Poet
About The Poet
Paragraphs 1-9
Paragraphs 10-18
Paragraphs 19-29
Paragraphs 30-33
Critical Essays
Understanding Transcendentalism
Emerson Unitarianism, and the God Within
Emerson's Use of Metaphor
Full Glossary for Emerson's Essays
Essay Questions
Cite this Literature Note

Summary and Analysis of The American Scholar About The American Scholar

Originally titled "An Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, [Massachusetts,] August 31, 1837," Emerson delivered what is now referred to as "The American Scholar" essay as a speech to Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society, an honorary society of male college students with unusually high grade point averages. At the time, women were barred from higher education, and scholarship was reserved exclusively for men. Emerson published the speech under its original title as a pamphlet later that same year and republished it in 1838. In 1841, he included the essay in his book Essays, but changed its title to "The American Scholar" to enlarge his audience to all college students, as well as other individuals interested in American letters. Placed in his Man Thinking: An Oration (1841), the essay found its final home in Nature; Addresses, and Lectures (1849).

The text begins with an introduction (paragraphs 1-7) in which Emerson explains that his intent is to explore the scholar as one function of the whole human being: The scholar is "Man Thinking." The remainder of the essay is organized into four sections, the first three discussing the influence of nature (paragraphs 8 and 9), the influence of the past and books (paragraphs 10-20), and the influence of action (paragraphs 21-30) on the education of the thinking man. In the last section (paragraphs 31-45), Emerson considers the duties of the scholar and then discusses his views of America in his own time.

Readers should number each paragraph in pencil as these Notes make reference to individual paragraphs in the essay.

Previous Glossary

Next Paragraphs 1-7

Emerson's Essays

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature Notes
About The American Scholar
Ralph Waldo Emerson Biography
Summary and Analysis of Nature
About Nature
Introduction
Summary and Analysis of The American Scholar
Paragraphs 1-7
Paragraphs 8-9
Paragraphs 10-20
Paragraphs 21-30
Paragraphs 31-45
Summary and Analysis of The Over-Soul
About The Over-Soul
Paragraphs 1-3
Paragraphs 4-10
Paragraphs 11-15
Paragraphs 16-21
Paragraphs 22-30
Summary and Analysis of Self-Reliance
About Self-Reliance
Paragraphs 1-17
Paragraphs 18-32
Paragraphs 33-50
Summary and Analysis of The Transcendentalist
About The Transcendentalist
Paragraphs 1-5
Paragraphs 6-14
Paragraphs 15-30
Summary and Analysis of The Poet
About The Poet
Paragraphs 1-9
Paragraphs 10-18
Paragraphs 19-29
Paragraphs 30-33
Critical Essays
Understanding Transcendentalism
Emerson Unitarianism, and the God Within
Emerson's Use of Metaphor
Full Glossary for Emerson's Essays
Essay Questions
Cite this Literature Note

Summary and Analysis of The American Scholar About The American Scholar

Readers should number each paragraph in pencil as these Notes make reference to individual paragraphs in the essay.

Previous Glossary

Next Paragraphs 1-7

Summary and Analysis of <i>Nature</i>

has been added to your

Reading List!

Removing #book# from your Reading List will also remove any bookmarked pages associated with this title.

Are you sure you want to remove #bookConfirmation# and any corresponding bookmarks?

The American Scholar

22 pages • 44 minutes read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Essay Analysis

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

Summary: “the american scholar”.

“The American Scholar” is a lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson, transposed into an essay. The occasion for the lecture was an address that Emerson gave to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, on August 31, 1837.

The subject of the lecture is the role of the American intellectual, as distinct from the European intellectual. Emerson calls for an intellectualism that is engaged, optimistic, and forward-thinking. He believes that American scholars have been overly dependent on their European forebears, and that they need to forge a role of their own. He warns against the “sluggard intellects” (Paragraph 1) that are a result of overspecialization, and notes that “[m]an is thus metamorphosed into a thing” (Paragraph 5), rather than a full man.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

7,900+ In-Depth Study Guides
4,800+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
Downloadable PDFs

Emerson views the role of the American intellectual in regard to nature, books, and action; these three different influences form three separate numbered sections of the lecture. In the first section, Emerson examines the intellectual’s relation to nature. He discusses the process by which scholars learn how to classify the natural world and to see the laws and systems behind the apparent disorderliness of nature: “To the young mind, everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things and sees in them one nature; then three, then three thousand” (Paragraph 8). Emerson warns against this process of tying separate things together to which they become overly detached and disembodied: a mere “accumulation and classifying of facts” (Paragraph 8). He urges instead that the intellectual learns how to see the natural world as a reflection of his own soul, and its laws as being equivalent to those of the human mind: “Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments […] And, in fine, the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim” (Paragraph 9).

In the second section of his lecture, Emerson discusses what he sees as the American intellectual’s ideal relation to books and warns against an overly reverential and backwards-looking approach to literature. He reminds us that earlier lauded writers such as Cicero, Locke, and Bacon “were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books” (Paragraph 13). While acknowledging the inherent sacredness of old books, he sees “a grave mischief” (Paragraph 13) in whole colleges and fields of study being devoted to the study of these books. He believes that such institutions can breed a timid and cautious brand of intellectual, and instead calls for a less fearful approach to both writing and reading. He reminds us that every book must speak of its time, and that every book is human and flawed. He believes that the intellectual who leads a full and vigorous life—that is, a life apart from books—will bring more to his reading and his writing: “One must be an inventor to read well […] When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion” (Paragraph 19).

The SuperSummary difference

8x more resources than SparkNotes and CliffsNotes combined
Study Guides you won ' t find anywhere else
175 + new titles every month

This leads Emerson to the third section of his speech, involving the importance of action in the life of the American intellectual. Stating that “life is our dictionary” (Paragraph 25), he invokes the necessity of empirical observation and being engaged in the immediate physical world. He speaks of the ways in which living and thinking inform each other as being equivalent to the laws of nature:

That great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold […] is known to us under the name of Polarity […] The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit reproduces the other (Paragraphs 26-7).

Emerson then turns his attention to what he sees as the duties of the American scholar. These duties are democratic and individualistic in nature. He emphasizes the importance of “self-trust” for an intellectual, and the necessity of ignoring what is fashionable: “defer never to the popular cry” (Paragraph 31). He also urges the intellectual not to shrink from the world or to think of himself as a “protected class” (Paragraph 32), but rather to see the world as a thing that he can remake. He rejects the “great man” (Paragraph 33) theory—the idea that only certain designated leaders can remake society—and states that the individual writer should see his role as active and essential as that of a statesman, if not more so: “The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history” (Paragraph 35).

In the final part of the essay, Emerson turns his attention to his immediate time. He sees cause for hope in what others have decried: the increased emphasis in society on the individual, and the increased attention paid to “the near, the low, the common” (Paragraph 40). He states that “[t]his time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it” (Paragraph 38) and declares that “[t]he world is nothing, the man is all” (Paragraph 43). This last statement underscores his belief that the world is not a finished, separate thing, but is in continual flux and a reflection of man’s consciousness.

Related Titles

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Concord Hymn

Divinity School Address

Self Reliance

Featured Collections

Books on U.S. History

View Collection

Essays & Speeches

Transcendentalism

In order to continue enjoying our site, we ask that you confirm your identity as a human. Thank you very much for your cooperation.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Literary Criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literary Criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 30, 2017 • ( 7 )

Emerson (1803–1882), the most articulate exponent of American Romanticism , was a poet; but he was distinguished primarily by his contributions to literary and cultural criticism. He was the leading advocate of American “ transcendentalism ” with its insistence on the value of intuition, individuality of perception, the goodness of human nature, and the unity of the entire creation. His views of nature and self-reliance not only influenced American literary figures of his own day, such as Thoreau , Whitman, and Dickinson , but also left their mark on European writers such as George Eliot and Nietzsche , as well as the American pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey .

Though he graduated from Harvard Divinity School and became a minister at a Unitarian church in Boston, his personal circumstances (his first wife dying of tuberculosis) and intellectual development led him to harbor doubts about conventional Christian doctrine. He traveled to Europe in 1832, meeting with Wordsworth and Coleridge , as well as Thomas Carlyle , with whom he maintained a long correspondence. Beyond the influences of these European literary figures, Emerson’s work bears traces of the ideas of Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher . His most renowned volumes and essays include Nature (1836), The American Scholar (1837), the Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College (1838) (where he criticized institutional religion for thwarting individual self-discovery), History , Self-Reliance , and The Poet.

Emerson’s essay Nature is one of the most powerful and succinct expressions of a Romantic world view. Emerson sees the universe as composed of “Nature” and the “Soul,” taking up a distinction of Carlyle and some German philosophers such as Fichte between the “self ” and the “not-self.” Everything that falls under the “not-self ” or the “not-me” is considered by Emerson to fall under the term Nature . Characteristically of Romanticism , Emerson believes that nature is apprehensible not to most adults but to the “eye and the heart of the child,” of someone who “has retained the spirit of infancy” (25). He stresses that nature is part of God and through it circulate the “currents of the Universal Being” (26). Whatever is furnished to our senses by nature Emerson calls “commodities.” A higher gift of nature is the love of beauty. Emerson sees beauty as having three aspects: at the lowest level, we derive pleasure from the “simple perception of natural forms.” But this beauty is merely “seen and felt,” and its elements are the mere physical appearances of nature which in themselves have no reality (29–30). Such nature reflects a higher and divine beauty which inspires man to virtue. The highest form under which beauty may be viewed is when it becomes “an object of the intellect,” which “searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God” (32). Hence the beauty in nature “is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty” (33).

A third use provided by nature to man is language. Nature, says Emerson, is “the vehicle of thought,” in a threefold manner. Firstly, words are “signs of natural facts”: the root of every word is ultimately “borrowed from some material appearance.” For example, “right” originally meant “straight” and “wrong” meant “twisted” (33). Secondly, “it is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual facts. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind” (34). For example, light and darkness are familiarly associated with knowledge and ignorance; a river expresses the flux of all things. Nature makes man conscious of “a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul he calls Reason . . . That which intellectually considered we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator” (34). What Emerson is indicating here is that nature taken in itself is a mere catalogue of facts. But once it is married to human history, it becomes alive, expressing a “radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts.” In this sense, nature is an “interpreter.” It remains for wise men and poet to redeem language from its corruption and to “fasten words again to visible things” (35–36). In other words, language is reconnected with material images, and good writing and discourse are “perpetual allegories.” Like Wordsworth , Emerson advocates the life of the country, a withdrawal from “the roar of cities or the broil of politics,” in order to facilitate such a rejuvenation of language. Emerson goes on to explain that the “world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind” (36). In a Hegelian sentiment, Emerson notes that “there seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms.” Material phenomena “pre-exist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God . . . A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit” (37). Hence language is rooted in the divinely overseen and progressive connection between the human spirit and nature; things in the world are themselves signs, are themselves allegorical enactments of higher truths; nature or the world does not exist in and for itself but as a vehicle of man’s spiritual expression.

Nature, according to Emerson, also provides a “discipline” to our understanding, offering an immense variety of material which can educate our understanding and reason (38–39). Moreover, nature disposes us toward “idealism,” toward overcoming our immersion in material things and recognizing that the material world is merely an expression of something higher, namely, a system of truth, morality, and beauty. Nature “is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us” (45). The poet communicates this detached pleasure, arising from his ability to lift things from their immediate context and to situate them in larger, spiritual and intellectual realms: “The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts” (45). The poet has a freedom whereby he can rearrange elements of the given world into a more profound, symbolic reality, effectively asserting the “predominance of the soul” over nature (47).

The poet, says Emerson, “proposes Beauty as his main end,” whereas the philosopher proposes Truth. Nonetheless, they both seek to ground the world of phenomena in stable and permanent laws in an idea whose beauty is infinite. Hence, the “true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both” (47). Whereas later writers such as Poe will subordinate the considerations of truth and morality to the overarching aim of beauty, Emerson holds these together in a precarious balance flown into the modern world direct from Plato’s Athens.

Like many Romantics, Emerson laments that the current age is reduced to a mechanical understanding of the world. Man at present, says Emerson, “works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it and masters it by a penny-wisdom” (55). Understanding, we recall, is regarded by most Romantics as a categorizing faculty, able to divide up the world in a mechanical way but unable to reach the unifying vision of reason or imagination. In such a view of the world, says Emerson, the “axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things . . . The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself.” The problem of “restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul” (56). By altering ourselves, by transforming the spirit that moves within us, we will transform the world of nature, since the latter is moved and molded by spirit (57).

It is Emerson’s essay The American Scholar that perhaps best articulates some of the distinctive concerns of American Romanticism. Emerson here attempts to give voice to the composition and duties of the American scholar in the context not only of contemporary American culture but also of the broader implications of Emerson’s transcendental beliefs in the unity of the world, and of the human soul, as well as the nature of their connection. At the beginning of the essay, Emerson declares that America’s “day of dependence” on foreign learning is drawing to a close (58). At one level, the essay might be read as a justification of, or as arguing the need for, such cultural and intellectual independence, and a relative freedom from the past. But Emerson’s text skillfully integrates the parameters of this freedom, this independence, this cultural nationalism, within a vision of the overall unity of humankind. His most fundamental premise is that “there is One Man,” who is present to a partial degree in all men: “Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals,” and the “original unit, this fountain of power . . . has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered . . . Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things” (59). Hence, instead of envisioning these subdivisions as “Man farming” or “Man trading” or “Man thinking,” we have effectively reduced man to the specific functions of “farmer,” “trader,” or “scholar” (59). None of these is equipped to look beyond his narrow function; the trader, for example, loses sight of the “ideal worth” of his work and, being entrenched within the “routine of his craft,” his “soul is subject to dollars” (59).

Like Marx , what Emerson is bemoaning here is the fragmentation of the human by division of labor into various isolated and ossified aspects, a fragmentation that has reached a new intensity with the extreme specialization of function in bourgeois society. This specialization has effectively caused the various human faculties to be separated out according to function, losing sight of their original coexistence and unity. Emerson’s proposed remedy for this fragmentation of the human being is, of course, markedly different from the revolutionary strategies of Marx . But it is worth noting the overlap between their perceptions of the circumstance of alienation in the emerging capitalist world. For Emerson, as for many of the Romantic and Victorian thinkers, it is the man of letters, rather than any economic or political agency, who holds the keys to salvation.

In the foregoing statements Emerson expresses a characteristically Romantic vision in his own exquisite mode. Like other Romantics, he rejects the world of mainstream bourgeois philosophy, the world of separate, atomistically conceived entities; a world where the human faculties have fallen from their original unity, and grope in presumed independence; a world of dualism, where nature is viewed as external to the human self, where object and subject, no longer coterminous and enjoying mutual harmony, glide beyond each other’s limits in the mode of alienation and incommensurability. Emerson is not returning to some pre-bourgeois vision of pre-established harmony between the self and world; he seems to be articulating a more Hegelian position, one that sees subjectivity and objectivity arising as part of the same movement and in necessary mutual relation. The atomism and fragmentation of the bourgeois world is effectively seen as an intellectual regression to a vision that remains frozen in the mode of separateness, a vision that denies the reality of relation and relatedness, a vision that places the part before the whole, a vision that denudes the immediate “fact” of its constituting contexts. Though Emerson talks of nature as the “web of God,” he also identifies nature with the expanse of the human self; hence, his vision of unity is based less on the idea of the divine than on a particular notion of human subjectivity influenced directly or indirectly by Kant and Hegel, one that sees the apparatus of subjectivity and objectivity as intrinsically commensurate; in other words, our minds and the objects we perceive are mutually adapted to (and constrained by) each other. Kant had said, for example, that we see objects “in” space because spatiality is part of our subjective apparatus for perceiving the world.

The major influences on the scholar include not only nature but also “the mind of the Past,” which is transmitted most clearly by books. For Emerson, a book represents the attempt of a previous scholar to receive raw data from the world, to reflect on this, and to give it the “new arrangement of his own mind . . . It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry.” Hence, scholarship (which Emerson is using in a broad sense, to encompass, among other things, poetry) is a process of “transmuting life into truth” (61). However, since no scholar or artist can entirely exclude “the conventional, the local, the perishable” from his book, each age must renew the task of interpreting the world: “Each age . . . must write its own books,” and cannot simply stand on the authority of books written for an earlier generation or era (61). If books are overprized, as they are by the “sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude” (the similarities to Marx having somewhat receded in Emerson’s text), the influence of books becomes tyrannical: they encourage the reliance by scholars on “accepted dogmas” rather than “their own sight of principles.” And instead of Man thinking, “we have the bookworm,” the book-learned class who would rank books as a third estate along with the world of nature and the soul. Unfortunately, says Emerson, colleges and institutions are built on the book, on the authority of the “past utterance of genius.” But the active soul, the true genius, who sees “absolute truth,” will not be constrained by the insights of the past, and looks forward. The scholar should rely on books only in times when he cannot “read God directly” (62). In a sense, Emerson’s argument here presents an inverted form of what Eliot will later claim in his influential essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Eliot urged the individual writer to subordinate himself to tradition, to the “mind of Europe,” which itself enabled and set the archetypal patterns of the individual poet’s insight into his own present. For Emerson, the “mind of the past,” being restrictive, is precisely what the contemporary writer must transcend in expressing the reality of his own era.

The final educative influence on the scholar, according to Emerson, is “action” (as opposed to a life composed exclusively of speculation). Emerson concedes that action is “subordinate” with the scholar but essential: “Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth.” He insists that we possess knowledge only to the extent that we have lived; “we know,” he says, “whose words are loaded with life, and whose not” (64). The point here, of course, is that made by all empiricist philosophies: that knowledge arises from experience and cannot indeed go beyond the limits of our actual experience. In other words, we cannot know about the world or about life through abstract reasoning, through the mere testimony of others, or through obeisance to religious or political authority. To this extent, the scholar must seek out varieties of experience, and must be “covetous of action. Life is our dictionary . . . This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made” (65). The implication is that the meanings of words are first found in experience; dictionaries merely formalize and artificially stabilize those meanings, while academic institutions provide frameworks of interpretation of experiences after the fact, after they have occurred.

Emerson concludes his essay by outlining the duties and virtues of the scholar: all of these, he says, are comprised in “self-trust,” a notion that has several dimensions. To begin with, the scholar is “self-relying and self-directed,” being constrained neither by tradition or religion, nor by fashion and the opinion of popular judgment. Indeed, he seems to stand in a relation of “virtual hostility” to society (67). Emerson anticipates Nietzsche in his view that the mass of contemporary humanity are bugs, a mass which acts like a herd; in a thousand years, only one or two men will approximate “to the right state of every man.” The remainder are content to bask in the light and dignity of a great man or hero (70). Yet the task of Emerson’s heroic scholar, unlike that of Nietzsche’s overman who rises above common morality, is to reaffirm and re-establish man’s lost connections with his universal, unified self. By having the courage and wisdom to descend into the secrets of his own mind, he fathoms the secrets of all minds and reveals what is “universally true” (68). He is the one who sees “facts amidst appearances,” who “raises himself from private considerations” and momentary opinions that cloud the enduring judgment of “Reason from her inviolable seat.” It is the scholar alone who knows the world: “He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart” (67). It is he who wakes people from their sleep-walking dream in search of money and power, leading them to this fundamental lesson: “The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature . . . in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason.” In somewhat Hegelian fashion, Emerson even sees successive scholars as embodying the points of view taken by “the universal mind” (70–71).

Notwithstanding these universalizing functions of the scholar, Emerson welcomes recent literature that explores, not the sublime and the beautiful, but the low and the common, the local and the contemporary (71). Ironically, Emerson’s notion of universality is sustained precisely by its refusal to be constrained by past wisdom, by the need to confront what is true and enduring in the present era. And it is here that the duties of the scholar devolve into the particular duties of the American scholar: “this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe” (73). He appeals to the young man of America to “plant himself indomitably on his instincts,” and to attain the perspective of his “own infinite life.” He ends with an eloquent call for an independence that is based on relation, on integration within a totality: “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds . . . A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men” (74). Emerson’s is a powerful voice attempting to situate American ideals such as self-reliance and independence (at both national and individual levels) within a pre-capitalist harmony of self and world, a harmony equated with attunement to the workings of the divine and thereby precariously balanced between secular and religious vision.

In his Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College at Harvard (1838), Emerson undertakes a critique of institutional Christianity in America. Emerson’s central criticism is that religion has lost contact with its original impetus, which was exploratory, creative, and intuitive; it is now based on mere precedent, tradition, and expediency. The current decaying state of the Church and the condition of “wasting unbelief ” mark the greatest calamity that can befall a nation – loss of worship: “then all things go to decay. Genius leaves the temple to haunt the senate or the market. Literature becomes frivolous. Science . . . Society lives to trifles” (89). Emerson also spurns modern attempts to found a new system of religion, such as the worship of the “goddess of Reason,” which ends in “madness and murder” (92).

Emerson’s proposed solution to this dismal state of affairs is partly founded on the Stoic doctrine “Obey thyself ” (84). He admonishes the future preachers at the Divinity School “to go alone; to refuse the good models . . . and dare to love God without mediator or veil,” to cast away “all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity” (90–91). As he has said in other essays, he reaffirms here that it is in the soul that “redemption must be sought,” and it is through such redemption that the world can be transformed, since the world is the mirror of the soul (89, 93). Only such redemption can counter the “loss of the universal” in modern secular democracy, along with the latter’s “exaggeration of the finite and selfish” (91). Emerson’s essay is an articulate expression of a Romantic view of religion, and indeed of the rootedness of a Romantic view of letters in a transformed conception of religion, one that stresses individuality, creativity, and exploration even in the realm of morality.

In fact, in his essay The Transcendentalist (1842), Emerson derides the supposedly “sturdy capitalist” whose apparently solid enterprise actually rests on “quaking foundations” (141). Interestingly, Emerson’s very definitions of transcendentalism are forged in the heat of his opposition to the bourgeois obsession with materialism (both as a philosophy and as a way of life, according prominence to economic interests above all else). The term “transcendental,” says Emerson, derives from Kant’s philosophy, which laid stress on certain forms of perception that belonged to the subjective apparatus (145). Emerson points out that transcendentalism is a form of idealism, and that the transcendentalist’s experience “inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded center in himself . . . necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective or relative existence . . . He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy” (142). Transcendentalists, says Emerson, are characterized by their withdrawal from society, their disinclination even to vote, and their passion for “what is great and extraordinary” (146, 148). They stand aloof from contemporary society, which is marked by “a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming which intimates a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim” (149). Their attachment is to “what is permanent,” and they speak for “thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable” (153–154). It is clear that the term “transcendental” has acquired a meaning here very different from that which it sustains in Kant’s work: it signifies not merely an idealism which rises above the immediacy of the senses, a localized emphasis on materialism, and a mutual isolation or disconnectedness of the phenomena of the world, toward a more unified and longer-term perspective that sees the various elements of the world as the cumulative product of the human mind or spirit; but also a transcendence that refuses to take the bourgeois world as real, that seeks to locate reality itself in another, higher, realm insulated from space, time, and history.

Emerson’s essay Politics (1844) expresses his skepticism regarding the functioning of government and political parties. He observes that governments exist to protect two types of rights, personal rights and property rights (156). Emerson cautions against the dangers of the “turbulent freedom” of modern times and warns that “in the despotism of public opinion, we have no anchor” (161). Hence he believes in less government and advocates instead, like Socrates, the “influence of private character.” The state exists, he says, to “educate the wise man . . . and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires” (163). The cultivation of character, attuned to nature and higher, spiritual interests, “promises a recognition of higher rights than those of personal freedom, or the security of property” (165).

Many of the foregoing themes, concerning nature, the religious sentiment, and the transcendentalist attitude of withdrawal from the currently degraded state of politics, are brought together in Emerson’s essay The Poet (1844). In Emerson’s eyes, the poet is of course a transcendentalist. The universe, he says, has three children, “the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty.” These three are equal, and the poet “is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty” (189).

It is the poet whose province is language; nature offers its vast variety to him as a “picture-language.” He uses the things in nature as types, as symbols; hence, objects in nature acquire a second value, and nature “is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part” (192). Emerson helps us to make sense of this by reminding us that the “Universe is the externization of the soul,” and that its symbolic value lies in its pointing beyond itself, toward the supernatural (193). In this way, the world is a “temple” whose walls are covered with emblems and symbols. The poet, in articulating these symbols, provides a remedy for the “dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly.” The poet “re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,” seeing things “within the great Order” (195). In other words, whereas ordinary perception is filled with images of discrete and unrelated objects, the poet, by “ulterior intellectual perception,” is able to see the connectedness of things, especially the symbolic connection between material and spiritual elements (196). Hence the poet’s very language, as well as the nature of his perception, is attuned to the workings, the perpetual flux, of nature. By this token, the poet is “the Namer or Language-maker,” naming things by their appearance or essence, but always intuitively aware of the connection between these, of the broader, perhaps teleological, picture in which each object exists. Such insight, which Emerson describes as “a very high sort of seeing,” is effected by the faculty of imagination (198), which is effectively “the intellect released from all service and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life” (199). In other words, the intellect is freed from its bondage to the restrictive bodily sphere of practical interests and survival.

Emerson refers to poets as “liberating gods . . . They are free, and they make free” (201). They liberate us from the tyranny and fragmentation of conventional perception, from “the jail-yard of individual relations,” and enable us to see ourselves and the world in a more comprehensive and far-reaching light (199, 201). Every thought is a prison, says Emerson, and the poet liberates by yielding a new thought. We prize this liberation because “we are miserably dying” (202). As with his essay The American Scholar , Emerson concludes by calling for poetic universality to comprehend what is peculiarly American. There exists, as yet, no poet of genius in America: “our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians . . . the northern trade, the southern planting . . . are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for meters” (204). Emerson’s words proved prophetic in Whitman’s “I sing America.” As with the transcendentalist, Emerson calls on the poet to “leave the world, and know the muse only,” to “abdicate a manifold and duplex life,” and to “lie close hid with nature,” away from “the Capitol or the Exchange.” The poet is he for whom “the ideal shall be real” (206). Emerson is true to the Romantic inversion of the categories of the bourgeois world: that world is insular, incomplete, and denuded of all relation, all context in which it would find its true meaning. To redeem such relation is the poet’s task.

Source: A History of Literary Criticism : From Plato to the Present Editor(s): M. A. R. Habib

The American Scholar

Ralph waldo emerson, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Social Unity

In his essay “The American Scholar,” Emerson urges his audience to remember that they are important parts of a larger whole and that, as scholars, they have a specific function in society: to facilitate unity. He asserts that all people, no matter their education or social standing, play equally important roles in creating and maintaining a successful society. As it is, however, Emerson says that society has become so divided that individuals have lost pride…

Nature and Connection

In “The American Scholar,” Emerson emphasizes the particular role that nature has in a scholar’s development. Emerson believed that man was one with nature, and that by studying nature man could learn more about himself and all of mankind. America—as a new and vast country that was still being explored—offered ample opportunities for scholars to study and experience nature in a way that Europeans from smaller and more heavily-developed countries could not. By exploring and…

Creation and National Identity

“The American Scholar” was written and presented in the 1830s, when America was in a state of transition. Having won independence and devoted its energies to the creation of a functioning system of government and legal system for 50 years, Americans were now at leisure to focus on forming an American identity. To Emerson , this meant forging an original literary and artistic identity separate from the traditional European ones that continued to dominate America’s…

The American Scholar Summary & Analysis in English | Ralph Waldo Emerson

Table of Contents

Fragmentation of Society

Emerson uses the text of his essay to trigger a response in the American writers, intellectuals and scholars. He begins with a criticism of the fragmentation of society in terms of occupations and mercantile classes. He considers it a roadblock to the true progress of society. He encourages them to celebrate their inner truths and put them on paper. He asks them to throw off the yoke of European intellectuals and begin an era of American creation.

Self-Reliance

They need to be original and independent in their thoughts, understanding and production of literature and knowledge. Self-reliance is the guiding principle of nature and every man needs to become self-reliant in order to unlock his true potential.

Understanding one’s own nature and mental process hold the key to developing original writers. This is linked to the inextricable relationship between one’s mind and soul. Therefore, when people read other classics, books or thesis, they should critically evaluate it rather than trying to worship it by copying it. They need to spurn the prison of the past.

Soul and Spirit

Our soul and spirit are manifestations of our link with the divine. Books can help when one is unable to connect with the spirit within. This is books have a tendency to arrest self-realization and immortalize concepts as permanent markers of reality.

Apart from nature and books, we are influenced by experience. Until one can act and experience heroic sacrifices and emotions, he cannot write a treatise on heroism or tenacity. Actions are important to provide credibility to the words. Emerson asserts the importance of responsibilities and duties that a scholar must adhere to. Every great mind must have a purpose greater than his own pursuit of excellence.

Trusting One’s Own Capabilities

He encourages every scholar to trust their own abilities and instincts in order to become a beacon of understanding and assurance for others. Only when simple minds can see greatness and unity with the universe within themselves, we can grow as a whole.

We can transform and progress as civilization and society only when great individuals can assert and use their originality and unfiltered instincts for the greater good. Such autonomy of the individual is crucial for collective growth.

Literary Analysis

a workshop for readers and writers

Essay on “The American Scholar”

This writing project emphasizes close attention to the language of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar.” The project is designed to engage you with the art of selecting and quoting relevant passages—an intellectual activity Emerson described as the “assimilating” power of the mind.

Choose a term or concept that interests you in Emerson’s writing. Write a 1500-word essay on your blog that 1) identifies the term and its associated concept in “The American Scholar” and 2) that elaborates on Emerson’s way of thinking about the term or concept.

A preliminary list of the most salient terms and concepts in “The American Scholar” might include the terms learning, scholar, thinking, “Man Thinking,” the “whole man,” intellect, intuition, institution, nature, power, books, “theory of books,” creation, reading, history, culture, action. Once you choose one of these terms (or a combination, or another of your choice), your job is to move from the term(s) you choose to other parts of the essay that will help you (and your reader) follow what he says. You are welcome to choose examples from other writing by Emerson, and you may cite those instances, but only insofar as they contextualize your primary focus on a close and careful reading of “The American Scholar.” Your essay will include:

a concise title: “Emerson on Books” or “Emerson and Culture”
an epigraph that will identify the focal term or concept you will discuss

Please review the post titled “Writing with Sources” before you compose the essay, as well as after you have produced a draft. Finally, your essay challenges for this week include:

Include relevant material from the journals and/or the letters and/or the sermons and/or other essays
Play with the structure of assimilating the quotation: the substantive lead in and the engaged commentary that follows

critically analyse the essay american scholar

GetSetNotes

Critical Analysis of Emerson’s The American Scholar

“The American Scholar” was delivered as a formal lecture at Harvard on 31 August 1837. Emerson was given only about two months notice to prepare this address, but he put into it his ideas about what a scholar in a new nation like America should be, ideas that had been developing in his mind for a long time. ” I should write for the Cambridge men [Harvard was a college in Cambridge , Massachusetts] a theory of the scholar’s office”, Emerson wrote in a journal entry in July 1837. “It is not all books which it behoves him [the scholar] to know,” wrote Emerson, “least of all to be a bookworshipper”. Rather, what was important was for the scholar to be “able to read in all books that which alone gives value to books…..to read the incorruptible text of truth.”

The essay is important, first, because it asserts what has been called a new spirit of American intellectual nationalism. Many earlier American authors had felt that their writings were inferior to the best that was being produced in England and Europe. However, Emerson asserted that “We [i.e., Americans] have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe”, and that it was now time for the new American scholar to express his own thoughts and to build up a tradition of American thought. It is because of this spirit of Emerson that the essay became justifiably famous. Emerson’s contemporary, the American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes praised the essay and called it an “intellectual Declaration of Independence.” Another respected poet and critic of the day wrote in the same strain and declared : “we were still socially and intellectually moored to English thought till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and glories of the blue water.”

In writing “The American Scholar”, Emerson had a two-fold intent–to define not only the truly “American” (and not English or European) scholar, but also to set out his ideas about the work and the functions of such a scholar. These ideas are set out in the first seven paragraphs of the essay and this constitutes a kind of introduction to the whole piece. Emerson begins his discussion by talking about an “old fable” (actually Platonic in origin) which told of the gods dividing “Man” into “men” so that “he might be more helpful to himself”, the analogy being of the division of the hand into fingers so that work could be done better. This fable implies that just as there is one hand constituted out of many different fingers, so too there is one man behind all the different kinds of men. However , Emerson laments that in America, Man has become divided into separate individuals each of whom does his own work in isolation from all the other individuals. This has the original unity of the One Man become dispersed, and instead of being ” priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier” all together, Man has become many “men”, each doing his work in isolation from the work done by the others. As Emerson says about the state of his contemporary society, it is “one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”

In this condition of the social state in which the “original unit” (man) has been “minutely subdivided”, the Scholar has become the “delegated intellect.” Emerson states that while in the right condition, the Scholar should be “Man thinking”, now he has degenerated into being “a mere thinker, or still worse, the Parrot of other men’s thinking.” But, according to Emerson, this negative trend is reversible, and the American scholar may yet become One Man in his thought if he opens himself up to three key influences–those of Nature, of the Past (Books), and the Future (Action). The next few paragraphs of the essay are devoted to a discussion and elaboration of Emerson’s thinking on these important influences.

About Nature, Emerson says the rising and the setting of the sun, the coming of night and the stars, the blowing of the wind and the growing of the grass all show that Nature is a continuous, never-ending process, a “web” created by God which has neither beginning nor end, and is a “circular power returning into itself.” The scholar is the man whom the spectacle of Nature attracts most. The scholar observes Nature and discovers that in it,thousands of most different and even contradictory things are united. And from realizing this, he understands that Nature is not chaotic but has a law of unity within it, which is also a ” law of the human mind.” Nature then becomes to man ” the measure of his attainments”, for the less he knows of Nature the less he knows of his own mind. And as Emerson sums up, the “ancient precept ‘know thyself’ and the modern precept ‘Study nature’ ’’ thus mean the same thing.

The second crucial influence on the mind of the scholar is that of the Past, whether this is inscribed in or embodied by literature, art, or any other human institution. However, Emerson in his essay singles out books as ” the best type of the influence of the past,” and he devotes his discussion to books alone. According to Emerson, books were born of man’s experience of the world around him and were the result of a process of sublimation by which “short-lived actions,” “business”, and “dead fact” were transformed into “immortal thoughts,” “poetry”, and “quick thought.” Yet, no book is totally perfect, and this is why new books have to be written for and by each new generation of men. In fact, if one loses sight of the fact that no book is perfect, then one will be inevitably led to an unthinking worship of books written in the past and mistake dogma for truth. Books written on a credulous acceptance of whatever was stated in the past are works not of “Man thinking” but merely of “men of [lesser] talent” who believe it ” their duty to accept the view which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.” Such men who blindly worship books and hold as truth all that is contained in them, Emerson calls “bookworms”.

The right use of books, Emerson argues, is for them to inspire the “active soul” of man. Hence, the really valuable relationship is not between man and book, but man and nature, a relationship which results in the transmutation of “life into truth.” Thus Emerson declares unequivocally : ” Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.” Of course, Emerson does admit that History and “exact science” must be learnt by “laborious reading”, but he indicates that such study is useful only when it contributes to the scholar’s ability to think by himself. Therefore, books (like the past too) are useful in so far as they inspire the scholar: “Genius looks forward; the eyes of a man are set in the forehead, not in his hind-head.”

Having stated this, Emerson thus moves on to discuss the third important influence on the scholar–that of the Future or of Action. Emerson indicates that a scholar should not be a recluse but rather a man of action, for without the experience of action—”handiwork or public labour”—”thought can never ripen into truth.” Action “is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products,” and so the scholar who engages himself in appropriate action has the benefit of getting “the richest return of wisdom.” And finally, the value of action lies in the fact that if “thinking is the function”, then “living is the functionary.” Put simply, this means that even if the scholar runs out of thought, he can always live a life of action.

After having spoken about the three influences necessary for the development of the American scholar: “the office of scholar,”writes Emerson, “is to cheer, to raise, and guide them by showing them facts amidst appearances”. He must perform “the show, unhonoured and unpaid task of observation.” The scholar must also willingly accept a life of poverty and solitude. But what he gets in return is the knowledge that he is ” the world’s eye….the heart.” He is the communicator and announcer of “whatever new verdict reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day.” The scholar’s statements have an effect on his hearer because they know that by “going down into the secret of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.” Thus the scholar’s audience “drink his words, because he fulfils for them their own nature.” But the main point that Emerson makes is that at the root of all the powers of the scholar lies “self-trust” or selfconfidence and conviction which “are the keys to success in every sphere of life.”

Apart from this, the other duty of a scholar is to be free from fear. ” Fear always arises from ignorance,” writes Emerson, and the scholar must have self-confidence enough to be able to influence other men with his ideas, illuminate them, and so free them from fear. Most people, explains Emerson, are of “no account”, merely “bugs” and “spawn”, “the man” and “the herd”. Most people too are in thrall to money and power. But if they are woken up, “they shall quit the false good and leap to the true.” And Emerson implies that the scholar is the man who can bring about this awakening. This is therefore the scholar’s main function—”the upbuilding of a man”.

The concluding paragraphs of “The American Scholar” have a clearly exhortatory purpose. In writing them, Emerson wished to tell his college audience that they had the ability of discovering themselves, of understanding for themselves “the inexplicable continuity of this web of God,” of realizing the process of Nature as a “circular power returning into itself,” and finally of living and acting in the light of these perceptions. Emerson in the concluding part of his essay writes as an optimist with unbounded faith in what has been called the American Dream, an idea of progress : that the American Man can accomplish both social reform and material success. The “conversion of the world” is what Emerson visualizes at the end, and the scholar will help to bring about this for he will believe “himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.”

One Reply to “Critical Analysis of Emerson’s The American Scholar”

Thank you so much ❤️ It is very helpful 👍

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)

June 26, 2024

published by phi beta kappa

Print or web publication.

The Widower’s Lament

After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss

By Steven G. Kellman | March 4, 2024

The World at the End of a Line

The grandson of one of American literature’s Lost Generation novelists reflects on his namesake’s love of the sea

By John Dos Passos Coggin | April 13, 2023

The Goddess Complex

A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking

By Elizabeth Kadetsky | March 2, 2023

Last Rites and Comic Flights

A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity

By Pico Iyer | July 28, 2022

The Believer

When nobody would touch Joyce’s manuscript, Sylvia Beach stepped in

By Keri Walsh | June 15, 2022

Ter Conatus

Reading Joyce in a minor key

By Donal Ryan | June 9, 2022

Know Me Come Eat With Me

In the world of Ulysses, food turns out to be everything

By Flicka Small | June 9, 2022

It Happened One Day in June

Why Ulysses is as vital as ever— compelling, complex, and direct

By Robert J. Seidman | June 1, 2022

The Bomb Next Door

Eighty years into the atomic age, U.S. nuclear power reactors have produced several million tons of radioactive waste—and we still have no idea how to dispose of it

By Thomas A. Bass | June 1, 2022

By Steven G. Kellman | Monday, March 4, 2024

● This week's archive pick

● NEWSLETTER

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — American Literature — Industrial Despair: A Critical Analysis of “Life in the Iron Mills”

Industrial Despair: a Critical Analysis of "Life in The Iron Mills"

Categories: American Literature Book Review

About this sample

Words: 612 |

Published: Jun 13, 2024

Words: 612 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Introduction, body paragraphs, narrative structure and style, thematic elements, symbolic significance.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof Ernest (PhD)

Verified writer

Expert in: Literature

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 1038 words

1 pages / 520 words

1 pages / 551 words

2.5 pages / 1232 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on American Literature

Henry Ford, an American industrialist and founder of the Ford Motor Company, is widely recognized for revolutionizing the automobile industry through his innovative manufacturing techniques and production methods. This essay [...]

Johnny, a key character in S.E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders, plays a crucial role in the development of the story. His character is complex and multi-dimensional, showcasing a range of characteristics that define his [...]

John Winthrop's "City Upon A Hill" is a concept deeply ingrained in American history and culture. The phrase, taken from Winthrop's famous sermon delivered aboard the Arbella in 1630, has come to symbolize the ideal of American [...]

Laurence Shames' "The More Factor" is an analysis of America's obsession with expansion. Shames dives into the historical of American culture, tracing the roots of this obsession back to the country's earliest settlers. From [...]

Does anyone know what a political cartoonist is? Its literal job description is to enhance a character flaw usually of a politician or the stupidity of a political event by drawing it larger. In other words, a political [...]

In the book The Fault In Our Stars by John Green, the main character, Hazel Grace, is introduced as a teen. However, she’s not your average teen, she is suffering from thyroid (lung) cancer. She’s described as a sixteen-year-old [...]

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

Instructions Followed To The Letter
Deadlines Met At Every Stage
Unique And Plagiarism Free

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

We're Hiring!
Help Center

Emerson on American Scholar " The American Scholar "

I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our cotemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years? In this hope, I accept the topic which not only usage, but the nature of our association, seem to prescribe to this day, ⎯ the American Scholar. Year by year, we come up hither to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on his character, and his hopes.

Related Papers

Steven DeLay

What is the American scholar? Is there such a thing? Taking Gabriel Marcel's firsthand impressions of the American spirit as its point of departure, then turning to Ralph Waldo Emerson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, and others, this essay reflects on those questions.

Rob S E A N Wilson

Dr. Abel Ngor Marone

Daniel Nutters

Richard Grusin

Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review

Reza Hosseini

A recurrent theme in Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings is his struggles with the problem of scholarly inaction. Commentators have given much attention to " The American Scholar " but less to his remarks about the " pale scholar. " In this paper, I focus on the latter and argue that understanding the evolving nature of Emerson's views about what counts for action could not only deepen our understanding of his philosophy and its orientation toward the conduct of life but also explain why, according to Emerson, there seems to be no reconciliation between " the theory and practice of life. " RÉSUMÉ : Le problème de l'inaction des intellectuels est un thème récurrent dans les écrits de Ralph Waldo Emerson. Les commentateurs ont accordé beaucoup d'attention à «l'intellectuel américain», mais moins à ses remarques concernant l'«intellectuel pâle». Dans cet article, je me concentre sur ce dernier point, en montrant qu'une compréhension de la manière dont évoluent les idées d'Emerson sur ce qui compte pour l'action permettrait non seulement d'approfondir notre compréhension de sa philosophie ainsi que son orientation vers la conduite de la vie, mais aussi d'expliquer pourquoi, selon Emerson, il ne semble pas y avoir de réconciliation possible entre «la théorie et la pratique de la vie».

Aladár Sarbu

The American Historical Review

Daniel Adamilo Aaron

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Cyrus R. K. Patell

Mary Cayton

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

Rhetoric of natural law in the public discourse of Benedict XVI

Jottin Jose
Published in Church, Communication and… 2 January 2024

31 References

The rhetoric of american exceptionalism: critical essays, communication ethics in dark times: hannah arendt's rhetoric of warning and hope, why deliberative democracy, systematizing toulmin’s warrants: an epistemic approach, the uses of argument, dialectics of secularization : on reason and religion.

Highly Influential

Related Papers

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies and similar tracking technologies described in our privacy policy .

Voice of the Discipline

News and publications.

Access AHA news and publications supporting the work of historians.

Stay up-to-date with the AHA

Many small yellow circles splashed across a blue and black background

June 25, 2024

AHA Members Co-author Article on SCOTUS and Gun Control

AHA members Holly Brewer (Univ. of Maryland) and Laura F. Edwards (Princeton Univ.) have co-authored an article for Washington Monthly…

Pens of various colors arranged in a partial circle. Kelly Sikkema/Unsplash.

June 24, 2024

Action Alert Opposing Ohio SB 83

June 21, 2024

AHA Signs On to CIE Letter Urging HEA-Title VI Funding for FY 2025

June 18, 2024

Welcome to the AHA’s New Website

The American Historical Review is the flagship journal of the AHA and the journal of record for the historical discipline in the United States, bringing together scholarship from every major field of historical study.

Perspectives on History is the newsmagazine of the AHA and is the principal source for news and information about the discipline of history. Since 1962, Perspectives has promoted our work by publishing articles and commentary on all aspects of the historical discipline.

History in Focus Podcast

Environmental Crisis and Recovery

Collaborative history + revisiting marion thompson wright, aha booklets.

The AHA publishes booklets that address a diversity of topics to serve the needs of history students and historians in all professions. Our publications include career advice for history graduates, overviews and syntheses of current historical topics and fields, and guides to teaching and learning in history.

For the Press

The AHA is pleased to provide resources for journalists and press. If you are a member of the media and would like to submit a request for a referral or interview, please email [email protected] . Please provide any pertinent deadlines and we will do our best to accommodate your request. The AHA can find you a historian for any topic, and assists with dozens of inquiries each year.

The AHA encourages the reading of history with periodic reading challenges.

Permission to Use AHA Copyrighted Material

All material published by the American Historical Association in any medium is protected by copyright.

Join the AHA

The AHA brings together historians from all specializations and all work contexts, embracing the breadth and variety of activity in history today.

What are you looking for?

Suggested search, l.a. times features dr. manuel pastor as an influential “activist scholar bringing the streets to the ivory tower”.

“When people ask me why I love Los Angeles, I always answer it’s because it’s got the world’s biggest problems.”

We are delighted to announce that ERI Director, Dr. Manuel Pastor, has been recognized by the Los Angeles Times as one of the L.A. Influential in “The Civic Center” category. This acknowledgment highlights Dr. Pastor’s over 30 years of scholastic activism.

The L.A. Influential project by the Los Angeles Times is a new initiative that honors individuals who are shaping the future of Los Angeles through their leadership, creativity, and dedication. The project examines who holds influence in L.A. through profiles, essays, photography, and video, spotlighting the city’s top leaders across key institutions and cultural spaces. The project is divided into six categories, each featuring a collection of changemakers making significant contributions to their respective fields.

For over 30 years, Professor Manuel Pastor has been a trailblazer in scholastic activism, examining critical issues like the 1992 riots, economic disinvestment, and social stratification. His work bridges academia and community action, driving meaningful change.

Read full profile

Explore other articles

Growing anti-crt and anti-dei legislation reveals the continued institutional racism of higher education, how to do research that changes the world, podcast: manuel pastor discusses the failure created by musk, billionaires, and individualism to our economy.

Los Angeles
Manuel Pastor

The Tuning Fork in the Ear

June 25, 2024

Mara Corsino

In a series of conversations with Merve Emre at Wesleyan University, some of today’s sharpest working critics discuss their careers and methodology, and are then asked to close-read a text that they haven’t seen before. The Review is collaborating with Lit Hub to publish transcripts and recordings of these interviews, which across eleven episodes will offer an extensive look into the process of criticism.

While I hesitate to use the word “delicious” to describe anything other than food, Carina del Valle Schorske writes delicious essays. One in particular, which won a 2021 National Magazine Award, is about Covid-19 grief and postapocalyptic dance floors . “In Plato’s ‘Protagoras,’ Socrates argues that dancing girls have no place in philosophical gatherings,” she writes. She proceeds to prove Socrates wrong by weaving together social dancing, journalism, and a philosophy of visibility. Another essay, a profile of the rapper and singer Bad Bunny that appeared in both English and Spanish, does what the ideal profile should do: situates an enigmatic, alluring, and successful cultural figure in a particular time, place, genre, and language. It provides us with not only an account of a person, but a panoramic view of history.

Carina received her Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in The Believer , The Point , Virginia Quarterly Review , and The New York Times Magazine , where she is a contributing writer, and she is currently at work on her debut collection of essays, The Other Island .

Most people in this audience are college students. How do you get from where they are to where you are now?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. I do come from a family with where there’s a precedent for higher education. My father’s father was a professor. But on the other side, my mother’s mother was a singer on Puerto Rican radio before she migrated and worked regular blue-collar jobs her whole life. My mom was a performer in the Nuyorican scene when she was young. During my childhood, I had a sense of the value of artistic and intellectual life.

It was interesting being raised by New York and New Jersey people in the Bay Area. There weren’t really Puerto Ricans or Caribbean people there. The Jewish people were not the same as the Jewish people on the East Coast. So there was a certain sense of cultural dislocation, even though my parents both had strong leftist sensibilities and I was very aware of the Bay Area as the hotbed of a certain kind of radicalism—Black Panthers, César Chavez, ethnic studies—alongside the hippie spiritual stuff going on in my family. I went to Yale on full financial aid. In many ways, it was edifying, and, in many ways, it was very scary.

Why did you find college frightening?

I would say that I arrived in college already exhausted by the class conflicts and pressures of private school, where the fiction that I “deserved” to be there concealed the threat that I must continue deserving, must manifest my gratitude. And at Yale all of that was even more intense; I could see the gears of power turning. I was supposed to be in the Directed Studies program, which is a Great Books curriculum for freshmen who show promise in the humanities. It bothered me that the definition of rigor was submission to this list of European texts that hadn’t changed much since the nineteenth century. So I bailed: I took seminars on Orientalism, on Caribbean intellectuals. Hazel Carby was a big influence—my mom had books by Alice Walker and Toni Morrison at home, but she was my official gateway into Black feminism. Both of my majors, Literature and Ethnicity, Race & Migration, were global and interdisciplinary. Some might argue that I had no disciplinary training over the course of my whole academic career. But I feel grateful for the education that I ended up getting. It forced me to make connections and analogies.

I studied poetry. I wanted to be a poet, but I never quite figured out how to make my poetry accommodate the political and historical questions that seemed urgent to me. I was also interested in a form of writing that could possibly support me as a career. I loved essays. But I graduated into that very difficult economy after the 2008 crash. At that point all the magazine internships were still unpaid. The editorial assistant gigs in New York or D.C. paid $17,000 or $25,000 a year. I wasn’t able to take those jobs even though I was credentialed appropriately. My boyfriend at the time lived in Boston. He was getting a Ph.D. at MIT and he said, “Come live with me for six months and look for a job.”

I thought I wanted to work at Harvard’s Hiphop Archive. I sent them a review I’d written of Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III . They weren’t hiring, but I had a conversation with the director, Marcy Morgan. She connected me to the editors of Transition , a magazine of decolonial politics and culture that was founded in Uganda in 1961 by Rajat Neogy. In the 1990s, it was revived by Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah. Transition published a lot of interesting experimental work over the years: Bessie Head, V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Paul Theroux, interviews with Caetano Veloso and Julie Dash. When I was there, I worked with lots of amazing writers including Zinzi Clemmons and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. It was so understaffed, and it didn’t pay much more than those other jobs, but because I was living with my boyfriend, the salary was feasible. On the side, I did some freelance editing and research for a psychoanalyst.

You applied to graduate school while working at the magazine?

That’s right. I started at Columbia five years after I graduated from college. It was also a strategic choice because it seemed like the most financially viable option—benefits, six years of funding, and guaranteed housing for six years in Manhattan, not far from my grandmother’s place in Washington Heights. I started the Ph.D. knowing that being a traditional scholar probably wasn’t a good match for me, but it seemed like the most capacious option for being intellectually self-directed and having time to figure out how I wanted to write. I started publishing during my second year in the program, using some of the materials that I was being introduced to in classes. I wanted to write about what I was reading—D.W. Winnicott, Clarice Lispector, Gwendolyn Brooks—in a voice for the public. My adviser, Saidiya Hartman, saw that I was yearning for a more intense, intimate, populist mode of engagement and sort of gave me her blessing. I started with little magazines like The Point , Boston Review , and Lit Hub. Because I wasn’t relying on those publications for money, I could afford to pursue my own subjects and style.

Almost every one of my guests has either an M.A. or a Ph.D., and has decided, for whatever reason, to take their talents somewhere other than the university. When you knew that you weren’t interested in being a traditional scholar, what kinds of things were you looking for in your education and how might you link that education to the essays that you’ve written—for instance, the essay on postapocalyptic dance floors?

That’s a great question because you wouldn’t think the links are very direct with that essay. But the stuff about Katherine Dunham really came from my oral exams. Katherine Dunham was a dancer, choreographer, scholar, pedagogue, and activist. I was very much inspired by the people I was reading, figures from the middle of the twentieth century like Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Deren, and the Cuban anthropologist Lydia Cabrera. They had relationships to academic institutions, but their interventions were radical and experimental. They were in precarious economic or social positions and were trying to piece together viable careers, to get in where they could fit in. I was supposed to be working on them but I felt more like I wanted to work with them.

It’s interesting that you brought up the midcentury anthropologists. When I read your pieces, I think of a roving, immersive, ethnographic writer who is, for instance, getting drunk with Bad Bunny and analyzing it afterward. I wonder if you could talk about how you position yourself as both a witness and an experiential subject in the essays that you write.

The phrase “participant observer” was helpful to me. The other thing I admire about anthropology, even with its colonial legacy—or in reaction to the colonial legacy—is the idea of writing a position paper. I don’t mean that in the legislative sense, but anthropologists are asked to account for their positionality in relation to what they’re writing about. I don’t think you need to make that the focus of every piece of criticism that you write, but I think that all writers should be taking stock of where their investment comes from. When I’m teaching, I like to present my students with a Gramsci line from his Prison Notebooks that Edward Said quotes in Orientalism : “The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.” Then he says you have to make that inventory. So it’s about reflexivity, but it’s also about the pleasure of participation and the rewards of intimacy. I know I’m never outside or above the situation I’m trying to describe, and I don’t aspire to be.

So, on the one hand, you’re trying to convey the politics of participation, and on the other hand, the pleasure of participation. There are different ways to make that inventory, and there is perhaps nothing as cringe-worthy as reading a piece in which a subject is strenuously trying to account for their own positionality and doing it in a way that feels either apologetic or insincere.

Or secretly self-aggrandizing. Like they feel obligated to say, Look how terribly privileged I am! And then they move on without letting that alter their analysis at all. It’s annoying.

How do you make sure your writing stays sensitive and reflexive in an intellectually robust way without being—I will use the word again—cringe?

You have to think about what’s relevant to the story. Not every element of your biography is relevant. To me it’s so much about tone. Margo Jefferson always talks about that. Not to draw a parallel with pornography, but you know it when you hear it. Does the tone sound sincere? Does it sound artificial? I feel like there’s a tuning fork inside my ear that helps me figure it out, which may not be a super cerebral answer to your question.

I will get back to the question of tone. In a sense, it’s a little unfortunate that you brought it up now because it would’ve been a nice pivot to the object that I’m going to give you. But I have one question to ask before we get to the object. The ways that you act as a participant observer are tremendously expansive. You engage with multiple people, sites, objects, and histories, all layered onto one another. Perhaps the most striking calibration that you attempt in these essays is between the history of individuals and the history of Puerto Rico. C ould you talk a little bit about your national or international, or transnational—whichever word you want to use—commitments?

The world comes to us in a tremendously complex tangle. The norms of contemporary journalism—maybe just journalism, period—insist on the present in a way that is flattening and not true to the thickness of time. In general, and definitely in the US, we are discouraged from historical thinking. Even in terms of what’s going on right now, in Israel and Palestine, you hear people say that referring to the occupation or anything that preceded October 7 is a distraction from the present. That attitude is not going to help us understand the violence of our world order. And it won’t help us transform it. I would say the same about nationalism. It’s not explanatory, and we miss so much if we insist on framing things that way. I come from self-consciously diasporic communities, but even if I didn’t, I hope I would still have enough sense to keep my moral focus on people rather than states.

In terms of Puerto Rico in particular, I know that you’re referencing the Bad Bunny profile, and, to a lesser extent, the dance essay, which does feature many Nuyoricans because we’ve always been creative drivers in the city’s music and dance scenes: mambo, salsa, hustle, hip-hop. With the profile, the fact-checkers wouldn’t let me use the word “nation” or “country” to write about Puerto Rico, even though Bad Bunny himself had used the word “país,” because that’s not Puerto Rico’s official political status. I ended up translating “país” as “homeland,” because another word that Puerto Ricans often use is “patria,” which is more like “fatherland.” I thought “homeland” kind of threaded the needle. But that’s an example of how seemingly small stylistic questions can be fraught with political conflict in American publications.

It’s not like I want to include Puerto Rican History 101 in every essay that I write. In fact, I find that work very thankless and frustrating and annoying. I want readers to have the tools to understand the meaning of a figure like Bad Bunny, but I don’t want to privilege the hypothetical “mainstream” readers who don’t have that context over the readers who do. I think it’s okay—good, actually!—for there to be some friction, some mystery. You said “layered” and that’s what I strive for.

I want to go back to what you said about having a tuning fork in your ear. I do not think of myself as a good listener of music. I’m good at listening to other people, I think, but I’m not a good listener of music, and I don’t even know what I mean when I say that exactly. I’m wondering if you could help us listen to something. I’ve previously given people texts to read or photographs to look at, but I was hoping that you could help us figure out how to listen to an object with an eye to making exactly the kind of argument that you have been detailing.

Do you recognize the object?

It’s “Yo Perreo Sola” by Bad Bunny—the lead single of the album that was out when I interviewed him, YHLQMDLG . It wasn’t my favorite track.

How does one begin to listen? I realize this is difficult because unlike having a text in front of you, the experience is over.

The first thing that I’m registering, always, is how the music makes me feel in my body. And this is a dance song.

That is already an interesting genre distinction to me. In our house, there are only two kinds of songs: there are jams and there are bangers. But you have a different kind of generic setup in your mind?

Yes. I’m interested in this typology of genre. It’s a dance song if I want to dance to it, which is maybe a simple definition. But this song is also making a claim about dance. The chorus is about “perreo”—twerking is not a perfect analogy, because “perreo” turns the word “dog” into the verb “perrear.” In the classical vision, the woman is maybe pinning the man to the wall with her butt. But on this song there’s a woman’s voice saying, “I do this by myself. I don’t need you.”

The genre judgement also has to do with a musical genealogy. When I first heard the song, with its quasi-feminist message, I immediately thought of “Yo Quiero Bailar” by Ivy Queen. Ivy Queen’s from the previous generation, sort of the Celia Cruz of reggaeton—the only girl who got any respect in that boys’ club. With “Yo Quiero Bailar,” she’s talking about how the kind of erotic movement that might happen on a Caribbean dance floor does not automatically imply consent for activities elsewhere. She wants to grind, she wants to sweat, but that doesn’t mean she wants to fuck. So for me, the message of “Yo Perreo Sola” feels derivative. And the sonics don’t make up for that.

On the one hand, you draw a distinction between what you feel like the song makes you want to do—the affective or embodied response to it—and, on the other hand, hearing the beats that plug the song into a whole history of genre. All you need to hear is the title of the song repeated to extract that generic history. Then, you can make a judgment. Is that all happening at the same time or is it sequential?

I always try to notice what my first reactions are, but I don’t privilege them too much, because music is a repetitive form. I guess these days you can “repeat” most anything. But with music, I think there’s an invitation to repeat. I’m interested in how my thoughts and feelings continue to evolve through multiple listens.

When I was getting my Ph.D., I taught freshman comp, and I would sometimes tell my students, “Feeling is thinking and thinking is feeling.” What I mean by “feeling is thinking” is that feelings are a useful starting point for understanding: you notice your feelings and then there’s an opportunity to step back and try to analyze where they’re coming from. Like, why am I angry? Why am I bored? And then “thinking is feeling”: when you experience yourself making a rational claim or critical judgment, you should inquire into the emotions that might be lurking under the surface of “thought.”

How do you land on the feeling or thought that this is a boring dance song? You offered a conceptual justification: It’s already been done, and the quasi-feminist message of it is not new. But when I think of a boring dance song, it’s one that makes me not want to dance.

Totally. It’s just as much rooted in my body as it is in a discourse analysis of the song’s freshness. I find the beat on “Yo Perreo Sola” a little frantic, and I don’t like the EDM escalation around the chorus. My sweet spot for dancing is more mid-tempo. And I prefer songs where you get a bunch of different beat switches, a super mix like “Safaera.” Those kinds of songs call back to salsa classics that are rooted in jazz and other Black improvisational traditions where there are long percussion breaks and polyrhythms.

But there’s still some pleasure for me in “Yo Perreo Sola.” It really developed another meaning in quarantine: the song came out in the summer of 2020, when we were all at home dancing on our own. There was something fun about that.

We haven’t really talked about the words. You’ve talked about the beat, the rhythm, and the callback to other songs in the same genre or subgenre. Where do lyrics come in? I have a recurring argument with my husband who hears rhythm first and doesn’t pay any attention to lyrics. I often only hear lyrics, and I’m quite dismissive based on lyrics and lyrics alone. Do you pay attention to lyrics in the same way you pay attention to words as a translation?

That’s funny, I have a similar conflict with my mother. She’s like, “You’re always paying attention to lyrics!” I don’t think that’s true exclusively, but listening to lyrics definitely made me want to be a writer. I was the kind of teenager that was always on those websites learning the words. But my dad listened to a lot of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. My mom listened to a lot of poetic Latin American singers. I came of age during the mainstreaming of rap as popular music. The voice is one of the instruments and the delivery of the words is one of the instruments. Words are rhythm. So to me, the distinction between words and music doesn’t feel tenable. I’ve always had the strong sense that words, music, and movement emerge together. We’ve disaggregated them in our society, but that’s not how it has to be.

I think a lot about rhythm, delivery, and tone in my own writing, especially when I’m writing about music. I’m allowing the object to influence the way that I’m expressing myself. One of the ways that I can show a reader what I’m writing about is by absorbing and performing some element of it.

Do you try to match your prose to, for instance, the rhythm of a lyric when you’re embedding it in a sentence? Are you trying to imitate or to perform what you’ve absorbed?

I did with the Bad Bunny story. I wanted to be funny. I wanted to be irreverent. I wanted to be slick and sticky. Or when I’m writing about a live performance of Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin singing “Ooh Baby Baby” on Soul Train, I want to take on a wistful legato. I want my structure and my sentences to have some of the tender lucidity that I feel there.

Since people can’t have the experience of listening to the music itself, the prose needs to approximate what you would judge its style to be like?

Exactly. There’s a line that people repeat when they want to describe the supposed difficulty of music writing: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” That’s crazy to me, because dancing is about architecture. Dancing is about space. It’s about how we navigate public space and our bodies in relation to one another. Dancing is already about architecture, and writing is about music because words are already a musical phenomenon. It’s not such a big leap to make the connection.

Part of the great joy of listening to music is listening to it with other people. I don’t get as much pleasure listening to something by myself as I do when I listen to something with my kids or my husband, or when I go to a concert. Listening with strangers is its own form of pleasure. How do you think about bringing other people’s experiences into the mix? Surely part of what’s happening when you’re listening in public is that your body is reacting to other bodies, reacting to the music?

I would argue that music is an inherently communal form even when you’re alone—or certainly when I’m alone. I’m thinking about all the other people it’s touched by the time it reaches me. I like to try to find ways to formalize that curiosity. In a profile, I like to look beyond the individual that our neoliberal media system has selected to be the hero. I’m more interested in how and why we collectively made them the hero. And in all my stories, it’s also about the interview practice, about refusing or reaching beyond traditional notions of expertise. Like, your average twentysomething in Puerto Rico has a richer sense of what Bad Bunny means than some musicologist.

When I’m listening to music or writing about a particular piece of music, I’m really trying to listen for how other people listen. If I hear a snatch of music coming from a car on my block, I like to see who’s driving. If I hear something out in public, how are other people reacting? If I’m on Twitter, I’m reading what people are saying about a new album drop. I think it’s fair to say that music is our most popular art form. That’s part of its value. Besides the supreme pleasure that I personally derive. Besides my wish that I could sing or play piano or play guiro. But I can’t. So, here we are.

An axis along which critics arrange themselves is the axis of authority that has, on its one end, the centralization of authority, and on the other, the active seeking or embrace of plurality. Another way to think of it might be as the difference between a centripetal and a centrifugal force in criticism. Have you always sought out that plurality of view? Does it change based on what your object is or where you are in your career as a critic? Were there more anxieties about being an authority figure, having just one voice, one view, one relation of experience?

In general, I’m not interested in a kind of criticism where people retweet it and say, “This is the last word on X or Y. Mic drop.” I’ve never been interested in those kinds of proprietary claims. I’m interested in a form of criticism that really opens up other desires, associations, lines of inquiry—because to me, an object is never exhausted, no matter how many people write about it. But there’s also so much where the idea of authority or expertise barely comes up because critics haven’t seen those objects as worthy of analysis. That’s my sweet spot.

Subscribe to our Newsletters

Submit a letter:

Email us [email protected]

Carina del Valle Schorske is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine . She is at work on her debut collection of essays, The Other Island . (June 2024)

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism and the Director of the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan. She is the host of The Critic and Her Publics , a new podcast series produced in partnership with The New York Review and Lit Hub. (April 2024)

June 9, 2022 issue

Exquisite Solitude

March 9, 2023 issue

Looking for Chaïm Soutine

April 20, 2023 issue

December 7, 2023 issue

March 10, 2022 issue

The Only Way to Go

February 24, 2022 issue

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Defending Bryher

Subscribe and save 50%!

Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App.

Already a subscriber? Sign in

IMAGES

33 Critical Analysis Examples (2024)
Critically Analyse Essay Example
Expert Tips on How To Write a Thoughtful Evaluation Essay
sle critical essay how to write a critical essay sle
⛔ Critically discuss essay. Critically Discuss Essay Structure. 2022-10-15
Critically analyse the poem ‘Ananse’ by Edward Brathwaite.

VIDEO

The American Scholar summary in Bangla written by Ralph Waldo Emerson
American scholar by Emerson Hindi explanation #books #study #english #literature
Critically Analyse and Report on the Ethical Considerations of a Study (REMY8412
The American Scholar
Want to explore creativity & business knowledge to tailor your future?#admissionopen2024#ApplyNow
The American Scholar #emerson #american #pgtrb #ugtrbenglish #ugtrb #literature #successacademy

COMMENTS

The American Scholar Summary & Analysis
The scholar, according to Emerson, is society's "delegated intellect.". If the American Scholar has achieved the "right state" then they become Man Thinking. If they have not achieved that state, then they become "a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.".
Emerson's 'The American Scholar': Full Address & Analysis
Summary of The American Scholar. "The American Scholar" is an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson in which he calls for the development of a new type of scholar in America who is independent and self-reliant. Emerson argues that the traditional European model of scholarship is outdated and that American scholars should break free from it and develop ...
The American Scholar Essay Analysis
Analysis: "The American Scholar". The title of Emerson's lecture, "The American Scholar," announces his aim to define a new, American type of intellectual. There are several characteristics of his ideal scholar that we can recognize as distinctly American. To begin with, Emerson explicitly declares his wish to break away from a ...
About The American Scholar
Originally titled "An Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, [Massachusetts,] August 31, 1837," Emerson delivered what is now referred to as "The American Scholar" essay as a speech to Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society, an honorary society of male college students with unusually high grade point averages. At the time ...
The American Scholar Study Guide
The 1830s, when "The American Scholar" was written and originally presented at Harvard, was a tumultuous time in America. The debate over slavery was becoming more and more heated, occasionally breaking out in violence (most notably Nat Turner's rebellion). The Indian Removal Act had stirred debates all over the country, more and more ...
The American Scholar Study Guide
Upload them to earn free Course Hero access! This study guide for Ralph Waldo Emerson's The American Scholar offers summary and analysis on themes, symbols, and other literary devices found in the text. Explore Course Hero's library of literature materials, including documents and Q&A pairs.
About The American Scholar
In 1841, he included the essay in his book Essays, but changed its title to "The American Scholar" to enlarge his audience to all college students, as well as other individuals interested in American letters. Placed in his Man Thinking: An Oration (1841), the essay found its final home in Nature; Addresses, and Lectures (1849).
The American Scholar Summary and Study Guide
Summary: "The American Scholar". "The American Scholar" is a lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson, transposed into an essay. The occasion for the lecture was an address that Emerson gave to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, on August 31, 1837. The subject of the lecture is the role of the American intellectual, as distinct from the ...
The American Scholar Summary
Summary. Ralph Waldo Emerson's The American Scholar calls for cultural and intellectual independence and combines a rejection of industrialization with a nuanced diagnosis of modern alienation ...
The American Scholar by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beliefs of transcendentalism: The goodness of humans. People are good but society and systems can make them immoral. Nature is paramount. Nature helps to guide thought and reflection. Emphasis on ...
Literary Criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is Emerson's essay The American Scholar that perhaps best articulates some of the distinctive concerns of American Romanticism. Emerson here attempts to give voice to the composition and duties of the American scholar in the context not only of contemporary American culture but also of the broader implications of Emerson's transcendental beliefs in the unity of the world, and of the ...
The American Scholar Themes
In his essay "The American Scholar," Emerson urges his audience to remember that they are important parts of a larger whole and that, as scholars, they have a specific function in society: to facilitate unity. He asserts that all people, no matter their education or social standing, play equally important roles in creating and maintaining a successful society.
The American Scholar Summary & Analysis in English
Fragmentation of Society. Emerson uses the text of his essay to trigger a response in the American writers, intellectuals and scholars. He begins with a criticism of the fragmentation of society in terms of occupations and mercantile classes. He considers it a roadblock to the true progress of society. He encourages them to celebrate their ...
Essay on "The American Scholar"
Essay on "The American Scholar" This writing project emphasizes close attention to the language of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "The American Scholar." The project is designed to engage you with the art of selecting and quoting relevant passages—an intellectual activity Emerson described as the "assimilating" power of the mind.
Critical Analysis of Emerson's The American Scholar
In this condition of the social state in which the "original unit" (man) has been "minutely subdivided", the Scholar has become the "delegated intellect.". Emerson states that while in the right condition, the Scholar should be "Man thinking", now he has degenerated into being "a mere thinker, or still worse, the Parrot of ...
Summary, Analysis and Theme of the Essay The American Scholar
Analysis of the Essay "The American Scholar" ... The second critical impact on the scholar's intellect is the Past, whether embodied in or inscribed in literature, art, or any other human institution. However, Emerson's essay singles out books as the " the best type of the influence of the past," and he devotes the majority of his ...
(PDF) Emerson's The American Scholar: A Study
Abstract. in this article an earnest attempt has been made to bring out Emersom\n's ideas pertatrnig to the influence of various factors on the American scholar and the duties and responsibilities ...
Provide a critical analysis of "The American Scholar."
Quick answer: You could critically analyze Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The American Scholar" by connecting his points to debates happening right now. You could link his argument that writers are ...
The JSTOR Understanding Series
The guide is a tyrant. We sought a brother, and lo, a governor. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, always slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it.
Essays
A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking. By Elizabeth Kadetsky | March 2, 2023. Essays [ssa_access]
Analysis of Recent Trends on Uzbek Migrants
This essay delves into the complex and multi-dimensional migration situation in Uzbekistan, examining it from both global and local perspectives. Using recent data from international organizations and national sources, it analyzes the drivers and patterns of migration, highlighting the implications of these trends for labor rights, human rights, and social equality. By employing a rigorous ...
Industrial Despair: a Critical Analysis of "Life in The Iron Mills"
Introduction "Life in the Iron Mills," written by Rebecca Harding Davis in 1861, stands as a seminal piece of American literature that offers a stark... read full [Essay Sample] for free
PDF "The American Scholar"
The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages.
Emerson on American Scholar " The American Scholar
Download Free PDF. View PDF. Emerson on American Scholar "The American Scholar" By Ralph Waldo Emerson An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837 Mr. President and Gentlemen, I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor.
Introduction: Pandemic TV, Then and Now
This essay serves as the introduction to TVNM's special issue on "Pandemic TV," an analysis of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic affected principally anglophone television and television-watching in 2020 to 2021 (including television's response to corresponding events such as the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings and the fall 2020 U.S. presidential election).
Rhetoric of natural law in the public discourse of ...
Abstract The paper examines the rhetorical imagination of the Catholic speaker in public discourse on the basis of the parliamentary discourses of Pope Benedict XVI. According to this researcher, Pope Benedict XVI's rhetorical model in the speeches is an extended version of Michael J. Hostetler's critical distance model supported by the translation idea of Jurgen Habermas. This conclusion ...
News & Publications
Stay up-to-date with the AHA View All News The American Historical Review is the flagship journal of the AHA and the journal of record for the historical discipline in the United States, bringing together scholarship from every major field of historical study. Learn More Perspectives on History is the newsmagazine…
PDF The American Scholar
SCHOLAR. Year by year, we come up hither to. helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end. society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is. all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.
L.A. Times features Dr. Manuel Pastor as an influential "activist
Data and Analysis to Power Social Change ... L.A. Times features Dr. Manuel Pastor as an influential "activist scholar bringing the streets to the ivory tower" ... The project examines who holds influence in L.A. through profiles, essays, photography, and video, spotlighting the city's top leaders across key institutions and cultural ...
The Tuning Fork in the Ear
While I hesitate to use the word "delicious" to describe anything other than food, Carina del Valle Schorske writes delicious essays. One in particular, which won a 2021 National Magazine Award, is about Covid-19 grief and postapocalyptic dance floors.. "In Plato's 'Protagoras,' Socrates argues that dancing girls have no place in philosophical gatherings," she writes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Summary and Analysis of The American Scholar About The American Scholar

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Summary and Analysis of The American Scholar About The American Scholar

The American Scholar

Summary and Study Guide

Related Titles

Featured Collections

Literary Theory and Criticism

Literary Criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Share this:

Related Articles

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

The American Scholar

Social Unity

Nature and Connection

Creation and National Identity

The American Scholar Summary & Analysis in English | Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fragmentation of Society

Self-Reliance

Soul and Spirit

Trusting One’s Own Capabilities

Related Posts:

Literary Analysis

Essay on “The American Scholar”

Critical Analysis of Emerson’s The American Scholar

One Reply to “Critical Analysis of Emerson’s The American Scholar”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)

June 26, 2024

published by phi beta kappa

The Widower’s Lament

By Steven G. Kellman | March 4, 2024

The World at the End of a Line

By John Dos Passos Coggin | April 13, 2023

The Goddess Complex

By Elizabeth Kadetsky | March 2, 2023

Last Rites and Comic Flights

By Pico Iyer | July 28, 2022

The Believer

By Keri Walsh | June 15, 2022

Ter Conatus

By Donal Ryan | June 9, 2022

Know Me Come Eat With Me

By Flicka Small | June 9, 2022

It Happened One Day in June

By Robert J. Seidman | June 1, 2022

The Bomb Next Door

By Thomas A. Bass | June 1, 2022

By Steven G. Kellman | Monday, March 4, 2024

Industrial Despair: a Critical Analysis of "Life in The Iron Mills"

Table of contents

Cite this Essay

Related Essays

Still can’t find what you need?

Related Essays on American Literature

Related Topics

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

Emerson on American Scholar " The American Scholar "

Related Papers

RELATED PAPERS

Rhetoric of natural law in the public discourse of Benedict XVI

31 References

Related Papers

Voice of the Discipline

Stay up-to-date with the AHA

AHA Members Co-author Article on SCOTUS and Gun Control

Action Alert Opposing Ohio SB 83

AHA Signs On to CIE Letter Urging HEA-Title VI Funding for FY 2025

Welcome to the AHA’s New Website

History in Focus Podcast

Environmental Crisis and Recovery

For the Press

Permission to Use AHA Copyrighted Material

Join the AHA

What are you looking for?

Explore other articles

The Tuning Fork in the Ear

IMAGES

VIDEO