| The following essays reflect my central interest in the literature and visual arts of Antebellum America. Although they were written as serious academic pieces, their primary claim is not authority and definitiveness: I would prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking. I hope that they have retained part of the excitement of reading and thinking about the works of Thoreau, Emerson, and Melville, as well as those of the artists Frederic Edwin Church and William Bradford. Consequently, they do not attempt to survey or explicitly engage with the voluminous secondary literature on these authors, although they were in no way written in a mood of arrogant ignorance of what past and present colleagues have had to say. Neither are they theoretical in the sense of providing new conceptualizations of literature and literary genres, or of problematising literary history. My primary interest is in how each work of literature changes the way we perceive the world: the literature of Antebellum America was especially concerned with producing renewed and enhanced awareness in its readers. Although some of the essays deal with famous works by famous writers (Emerson's Essays, Thoreau's Walden), a fair proportion deals with comparatively neglected works by famous writers: such narratives and short stories as Thoreau's « Chesuncook » or Melville's « The Piazza » and « The Encantadas », as well as these authors' Journals, occupy a minor place in the critical literature. My assumption was that they deserve attention in their own right, and that re-entering the canon through the side doors might provide new insights, and help to expose and clarify some still unarticulated configurations of meaning. Although we cannot re-create the exact experience of the writers we study, we may try to reconstruct their ways of seeing, not with a view to providing disembodied knowledge, but so as to see through their eyes, so to speak. If postmodernism has made decentering one of its catchwords, my purpose is not to decenter the canon, the authors or their works, but to experience the way they decenter us as readers and human beings, thus helping us expand our consciousness. And what has always fascinated me, what I have found most exhilarating and stimulating, is the attempt to experience decentering in a way that is always singular. In other words, my purpose was not to study this or that theme or topic, but to experience singular works by singular authors and lie open to the way they transform us. This is not to say that these works do shape our perception of reality, but that they provide a powerful counterweight to our easily and rapidly fossilizing worldview. They give momentum to the life of the mind, they keep it going, they preserve mobility and movement. |
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