Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Ever-Evolving Art of Self-Reliant Reading
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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- abstract
- Self-reliance is a significant component of contemporary Emerson scholarship, but few scholars have examined the way in which reading--almost unarguably Emerson's favorite pastime--can contribute to this canonical Emersonian idea. By delineating a passage in Emerson's journal which purports to entail the "secret" to self-reliance, I suggest that a key aspect of generating self-reliance is making your "supposed deficiencies redundancy" (Emerson, Journals VII: 521), which is the gradual abdication of self-doubt, and that this secret is manifest in passages that describe the act of reading throughout Emerson's Essays. However, that secret--like many of Emerson's concepts--evolves over his career and takes on new shades of meaning, and my project attempts to trace that evolution to arrive at a sketch of how reading can inform self-reliance. I use the essays "History", "The Poet", and "Experience" to demonstrate this evolution and also self-reliant reading's limitations. Ultimately, I hope to suggest that it's these very limitations that create the possibility for ethical conduct in an indeterminate world, thereby demonstrating the necessity of reading for living "the good life".
- subject
- 19th Century American Literature
- Ethics
- Literary Theory
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Reading
- contributor
- Wilson, Eric G (committee chair)
- Hena, Omaar (committee member)
- Maine, Barry (committee member)
- date
- 2013-01-09T09:35:19Z (accessioned)
- 2013-01-09T09:35:19Z (available)
- 2012 (issued)
- degree
- English (discipline)
- identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10339/37670 (uri)
- language
- en (iso)
- publisher
- Wake Forest University
- title
- Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Ever-Evolving Art of Self-Reliant Reading
- type
- Thesis