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The Accuracy of Irrelevance The Accuracy of Irrelevance
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Failure Artists Failure Artists
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Kindling Kindling
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Notes Notes
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27 Emerson, Melville, Futility
Get accessRachel Banner, Associate Professor of English, English Department, West Chester University of Pennsylvania
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Published:18 July 2024
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Abstract
This chapter attends to a thread of early literary scholarship on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville that positions them as combatants. It shows how a critical staging of Emerson and Melville in a pasteboard arena of abiding philosophical conflict helps us understand a great deal about the cultural psychodramas of professional literary criticism of earlier periods. It poses the issue of Emerson and Melville’s ongoing value within US literary studies as a genuine question and considers their own writings about grief, violence, and unhappy endings to propose an unlikely answer: that their most profound relationship to one another in this cultural moment may be that both of them evince a philosophical contentment with the necessity of their own increasing irrelevance. And yet, attending to each writer’s theorizations of their own futility may paradoxically offer a way for future readers to still find something of use in their writings now.
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