Re-Transcendentalizing the Transcendentalists

Re-Transcendentalizing the Transcendentalists Daniel S. Malachuk (bio) Readers outside our field of study may be surprised to learn that for the last forty years many of the most influential scholars of the American Transcendentalists have aimed to de-transcendentalize them. What Emerson and the rest meant by Transcendentalism has been, and likely always will be, debated, but what these scholars mean by detranscendentalizing the Transcendentalists is not so hard to explain. That’s the first of this introduction’s three aims, the others being to note how some scholars have lately challenged this venerable project, and finally to preview this special issue: six essays originating at an international conference on Transcendentalism in July 2018 that together comprise—we believe—the most intentional, multifarious expression of this challenge to the de-transcendentalizing status quo thus far.1 Altogether we aim with this issue to show how our small proposed prefix shift—we call our project “re-transcendentalizing the Transcendentalists”—could have big implications not just for Transcendentalism studies but for the study of nineteenth-century American literature as a whole. Sharing this project in ESQ is especially appropriate, for it was here, back in 1984, that Lawrence Buell first identified [End Page 519] a new trend in Transcendentalist studies. “The Emerson Industry in the 1980’s: A Survey of Trends and Achievements” was a characteristically sophisticated assessment of new directions in Emerson scholarship, many of which pointed, he contended, toward a paradigm shift: “a break,” Buell wrote, from the “cozy” consensus that Transcendentalist studies properly orbits what Jonathan Bishop (1964) called Emerson’s “master term,” “the Soul.”2 Considering new scholarly editions, biographical studies, and an array of novel interpretations from the 1970s and early 1980s, Buell discerned a common effort “to de-transcendentalize Emerson” (Buell, 120). With remarkable prescience, as I’ll now review, Buell not only accurately characterized the two major styles of “de-” scholarship then just coalescing but anticipated its two primary points of resistance, an incipient “re-” scholarship that we seek to build upon here. The first major style of de-transcendentalizing scholarship Buell identified was a “resurgence of American consensus historiography exemplified by [Sacvan] Bercovitch” (1975) along with others like Quentin Anderson (1971) and Michael Gilmore (1982) (Buell, 127, 123–24). Yes, these scholars shared their postwar predecessors’ views about “Emersonianism as an avatar of mainstream American civil religion” (Buell, 127), but they interpreted that civil religion—in Emerson’s own soul talk and in Reagan’s morning in America rhetoric—quite differently. For these younger scholars, to de-transcendentalize Emerson meant wresting away the metaphysical cloaking to expose the American empire’s most useful idiot.3 As Johannes Völz (2010) has more recently characterized them, these New Americanists pursued this exposé of Transcendentalism’s imperialist sympathies for decades, and inspired others to pursue related charges, such as white supremacy (Nell Irvin Painter, 2010) and settler colonialism (Adam Dahl, 2018).4 With the help of Rita Felski (2015) we can now characterize this first style [End Page 520] of “de”- scholarship as critique, its main affective stance being unrelenting suspicion.5 But for Buell and many others in literary studies, the 1980s meant not just the neoconservative revival of American imperialism (and the resulting academic prosecution of any canonical apologists for it) but also, on another front, “the rise of the poststructuralist grammatological challenge” (Buell, 127). Buell’s second great insight in 1984, then, was that an entirely different set of Emerson scholars, also launched in the 1970s, were de-transcendentalizing the Transcendentalists to show that, somehow, these antebellum Neoplatonists had in fact been skeptics, best located on a line running from Montaigne right through to Derrida and Foucault. Like the New Americanists, these scholars set themselves in opposition to their postwar predecessors (genuflecting before Emerson the seer), but their affectual orientation was entirely different. Far from suspecting Emerson to be a reactionary imperialist, they hailed him as a prototypical postmodernist. Who originated such a breathtakingly counterintuitive reading, “ransack[ing]” “Emerson’s Transcendental side” “for intimations of self-skepticism” (Buell, 127)? There was, Buell noted, Harold Bloom (a 1971 collection reprinted a 1966 essay on Emerson’s commitment to self-fashioning), and we would...