TY - BOOK AU - Sacks,Kenneth S. TI - Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His Struggle for Self-Reliance SN - 9780691223681 AV - PS1615.A84 U1 - 814/.3 21 PY - 2022///] CY - Princeton, NJ : PB - Princeton University Press, KW - Learning and scholarship in literature KW - Self-confidence KW - Self-reliance KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General KW - bisacsh KW - Alcott, Bronson KW - Boston Quarterly Review KW - Brook Farm KW - Burke, Edmund KW - Calvinism KW - Carlyle, Jane KW - Christian Examiner KW - Common Sense philosophy KW - Congregationalism KW - Dwight, Timothy KW - Everett, Alexander KW - Freemasonry KW - Friends of Progress KW - Fuller, Margaret KW - Graham, Sylvester KW - Great Awakenings KW - Harvard College KW - Kant, Immanuel KW - North American Review KW - Parkman, Francis KW - Perkins, Ephraim KW - Pierce, John KW - Princeton Theological Seminary KW - Ticknor, George KW - Trinitarian theology KW - abolitionism KW - antinomianism KW - charity KW - culture KW - democracy KW - double consciousness KW - empiricism KW - experience KW - free speech KW - gnosticism KW - history as biography KW - idealism KW - institutions KW - jeremiads KW - languages, modern KW - lyceum movement KW - materialism KW - miracles controversy KW - moral philosophy KW - natural law KW - nature KW - pragmatists KW - realism KW - revivalism KW - scientific rationalism KW - self-reliance KW - temperance reform N1 - Frontmatter --; CONTENTS --; LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS --; PREFACE --; Introduction --; Chapter One “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR” --; Chapter Two AMERICA IN “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR” --; Chapter Three THE SCHOLAR TRANSFORMED --; Chapter Four SELF-RELIANCE --; Chapter Five FRIENDS --; Chapter Six ALCOTT --; Chapter Seven FOREVER THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR --; Appendix TEXT OF “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR” --; ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES --; NOTES --; BIBLIOGRAPHY --; INDEX; restricted access N2 - A seminal figure in American literature and philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson is considered the apostle of self-reliance, fully alive within his ideas and disarmingly confident about his innermost thoughts. Yet the circumstances around "The American Scholar" oration--his first great public address and the most celebrated talk in American academic history--suggest a different Emerson. In Understanding Emerson, Kenneth Sacks draws on a wealth of contemporary correspondence and diaries, much of it previously unexamined, to reveal a young intellectual struggling to define himself and his principles. Caught up in the fierce dispute between his Transcendentalist colleagues and Harvard, the secular bastion of Boston Unitarianism and the very institution he was invited to honor with the annual Phi Beta Kappa address, Emerson agonized over compromising his sense of self-reliance while simultaneously desiring to meet the expectations of his friends. Putting aside self-doubts and a resistance to controversy, in the end he produced an oration of extraordinary power and authentic vision that propelled him to greater awareness of social justice, set the standard for the role of the intellectual in America, and continues to point the way toward educational reform. In placing this singular event within its social and philosophical context, Sacks opens a window into America's nineteenth-century intellectual landscape as well as documenting the evolution of Emerson's idealism. Engagingly written, this book, which includes the complete text of "The American Scholar," allows us to appreciate fully Emerson's brilliant rebuke of the academy and his insistence that the most important truths derive not from books and observation but from intuition within each of us. Rising defiantly before friend and foe, Emerson triumphed over his hesitations, redirecting American thought and pedagogy and creating a personal tale of quiet heroism UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691223681?locatt=mode:legacy UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780691223681 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780691223681/original ER -