Understanding Gregory Bateson: Emerson in the Twenty-first Century

by Arthur S. Lothstein (Editor), Michael Brodrick (Editor)

Overview

New Morning brings together philosophers, poets, and literary critics to celebrate and engage the ideas of the great American writer and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson's legacy influences many areas; he was a champion of democracy and civil rights, a naturalist, an idealist, an artist, a writer, and a philosopher. Rather than focusing on Emerson in his historical context, this volume brings to light the ways in which Emerson's voice and work still speak powerfully to the concerns of the present moment. In short essays and poems, some of America's most influential scholars and poets—including John J. McDermott, Mary Oliver, Mark Strand, Robert C. Pollock, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Buell—underscore the relevance of Emerson's thought to contemporary issues as varied as the environment, race, politics, spirituality, aesthetics, and education.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791477878
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	08/21/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	234
File size:	757 KB

About the Author

Arthur S. Lothstein is Professor of Philosophy at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. Michael Brodrick is a graduate student in Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

Table of Contents

Forever Young: A Preface
Michael Brodrick

Acknowledgments

Dancing with Emerson
Deborah Digges

1. Emerson: An Introduction
Mary Oliver

2. The Single Vision
Robert C. Pollock

Windfall
William Heyen

3. Spires of Influence
John J. McDermott

4. Teaching for Lustres: An Essay on the Emersonian Teacher
Arthur S. Lothstein

The Continental College of Beauty
Mark Strand

5. Emerson at The Gates
David LaRocca

6. Taking Emerson Personally
John Lysaker

Local Knowledge
Paul Hoover

7. Face to Face with Emerson
David Marr

8. Emerson’s Natures: Origins of and Possibilities for American Environmental Thought
Douglas R. Anderson

Shudder
Dorene Evans

9. Emerson and the Reinvention of Democracy: A Lesson for the Twenty-first Century
Len Gougeon

10. Individualism, Natural Law, Human Rights: Emerson on “The Scholar” vis-à-vis Emerson on Reform
Lawrence Buell

For the Children
Gary Snyder

11. After Emerson: Of General Knowledge and the Common Good
Ann Lauterbach

Letter to Lucia
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

Like a series of gateways, these essays and poems seek the conditions of possibility for a new Emerson, one who provokes and witnesses a world as radically uncertain, displaced, and mercurial as our own, and as riddled with inescapable yet insoluble questions about teaching and ignorance, doubt and faith, reason, beauty, and the fate of nature. If each age must write its own Emerson, then this collection offers all of us the place to start.— Laura Dassow Walls, author of Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth

From the Publisher