Please join the Nineteenth-Century Forum for a discussion of English PhD candidate Ross Martin's dissertation introduction: "American Demonology after the Ancients."
Abstract: My dissertation introduction, "American Demonology after the Ancients," follows the Demonic as a thread of interest traversing the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville. By Demonic, I mean a primal phenomenon which manifests itself in ontological contradiction as something. (In Emerson, the something is Tragic art; in Fuller, it is Leila; in Thoreau, it is the arrowhead; in Melville, it is the whale.) The ontological paradox through which the Demonic manifests an identity—unity and variety—is not resolved. Rather, by disclosing itself (as a third estate of being) in an insurmountable contrast, the Demonic stages an upheaval in thinking whereby pure difference is affirmed. By inciting affirmation in the context of (Antebellum) Romantic American literature, this account of the Demonic entails the overturning of Platonic demonology, with its negative relation to life. I thus trace two ontological perspectives, the negative and the affirmative, and the associated ethical orientations in the register of demonism. But by reversing Platonism through demonology, American writers imperil the logics dependent upon it, including dialectics and the univocity underlying recent criticism. For these reasons, the shadow discourse that I follow inverts the status of thought and makes Emerson’s seemingly naïve proclamation in Nature (1836), that America is a place for “new thoughts,” a completely serious claim.
Key names: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, Emanuel Swedenborg, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze.
Key terms: demonology, affirmation, fate, and rebirth.
Key disciplinary interests: American literature, Romanticism, ecology, animal studies, comparative literature, philosophy, and classics.
To RSVP and request a copy of Ross's introduction please email Evan Radeen (eradeen@umich.edu).
Abstract: My dissertation introduction, "American Demonology after the Ancients," follows the Demonic as a thread of interest traversing the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville. By Demonic, I mean a primal phenomenon which manifests itself in ontological contradiction as something. (In Emerson, the something is Tragic art; in Fuller, it is Leila; in Thoreau, it is the arrowhead; in Melville, it is the whale.) The ontological paradox through which the Demonic manifests an identity—unity and variety—is not resolved. Rather, by disclosing itself (as a third estate of being) in an insurmountable contrast, the Demonic stages an upheaval in thinking whereby pure difference is affirmed. By inciting affirmation in the context of (Antebellum) Romantic American literature, this account of the Demonic entails the overturning of Platonic demonology, with its negative relation to life. I thus trace two ontological perspectives, the negative and the affirmative, and the associated ethical orientations in the register of demonism. But by reversing Platonism through demonology, American writers imperil the logics dependent upon it, including dialectics and the univocity underlying recent criticism. For these reasons, the shadow discourse that I follow inverts the status of thought and makes Emerson’s seemingly naïve proclamation in Nature (1836), that America is a place for “new thoughts,” a completely serious claim.
Key names: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, Emanuel Swedenborg, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze.
Key terms: demonology, affirmation, fate, and rebirth.
Key disciplinary interests: American literature, Romanticism, ecology, animal studies, comparative literature, philosophy, and classics.
To RSVP and request a copy of Ross's introduction please email Evan Radeen (eradeen@umich.edu).
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