Emerson and Power: Creative Antagonism in the Nineteenth Century.

DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996.

Michael Lopez

This is the best overview of the state of the literature on Emerson. It gracefully carries the reader from the initial evaluations of Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Santayana, and John Dewey, through the development of what had become the standard view represented by Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) and Stephen Whicher's Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, (1953) to the contemporary 'detranscendentalizing' movement that reads Emerson "after Nietzsche, after Wittgenstein" as Stanley Cavell puts it. The book aims in part to counter the mid-century views that stressed the moral idealism and 'naive' optimism that made some experience reading Emerson's Essays as akin to taking "happiness pills" (Kennith Burke).

Lopez continues a revaluation of Emerson's "demanding optimism" that had its first roots in Newton Arvin's compensatory essay "The House of Pain: Emerson and the Tragic Sense." (Hudson Review, Vol. XII, No. 1, Spring 1959) Lopez describes a "New Emerson," like the "New Nietzsche" that has emerged since Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) Jacques Derrida's "Differance" (1968) "The Ends of Man" (1972) and Tracy Strong's Friederich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (1975).

Lopez’s book is an excellent corrective to the conventional wisdom and what has nearly become the standard interpretation of Emerson, although Lopez argues forcefully that no reading of Emerson has established itself as the accepted standard view. Emerson is distinguished from other major American writers of his time such as Poe, Whitman and Melvill precisely on the lack of a consensus as to what his main writings mean. This is in part because scholars have been reluctant to take what Emerson says in his major published works at face value. The typical response to his 'hard sayings' is to attribute the hyperbolic style and his exuberance and enthusiasm. But Lopez shows more than that Emerson expresses ideas in line with the intellectual and philosophical milieux of the ninetieth century. He also shows that Emerson's ironies, aphorisms, peculiar voicing of claims and subtle forms of self-erasure warrant a view of his work as significantly more 'modern' or even 'post-modern' than has been allowed.


From the dust jacket:

“In this revisionist analysis, Lopez presents a "detranscendentalized" Emerson--a tougher, timelier, more controversial writer, whose fundamental belief in creative antagonism predates Nietzsche's philosophy of power. Placing him within a post-idealist tradition--an intellectual context that has often been ignored--Lopez portrays Emerson as a representative nineteenth-century thinker with important links to Carlyle, Nietzsche, William James, and Henry Adams.

Lopez examines the ever-widening spectrum of Emerson criticism to show that Emerson can best be understood as a writer deeply concerned with practicality, power, and the issues raised by the post-Hegelian philosophy of his time. While not denying the transcendentalist elements of Emerson's thought, Lopez points out the common ground between Emerson and mainstream nineteenth-century thinkers and illuminates crucial connections that critics have generally been reluctant to acknowledge.

Reasserting the centrality of Emerson's essay's, Lopez's overview reconsiders the journals, letters, and early lectures and offers new readings of "Fate," Nature, The Conduct of Life, and the neglected, late work Society and Solitude. Emerson's thought has traditionally been defined in terms of evolving phases; Lopez finds an alternate, more deeply rooted pattern--a psychology of empowerment that abides, unchanged, through Emerson's entire career.

Emerson and Power is an important contribution to the current reassessment of Emerson. It is also a meditation on American and European intellectual traditions of the nineteenth century and the much-debated question of literary canonization in America.”