American Impersonal brings together some of the most influential scholars now working in American literature to explore the impact of one of America's leading literary critics: Sharon Cameron. It engages directly with certain arguments that Cameron has articulated throughout her career, most notably her late work on the question of impersonality. In doing so, it provides responses to questions fundamental to literary criticism, such as: the nature of personhood; the logic of subjectivity in depersonalized communities; the question of the human within the problematic of the impersonal; how impersonality relates to the "posthuman." Additionally, some essays respond to the current "aesthetic turn" in literary scholarship and engage with the lyric, currently much debated, as well as the larger questions of poetics and the logic of genre. These crucial issues are addressed from the perspective of an American literary and philosophical tradition, and progress chronologically, starting from Melville and Emerson and moving via Dickinson, Thoreau and Hawthorne to Henry James and Wallace Stevens. This historical perspective adds the appeal of revisiting the American nineteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition, and even rewriting it.

PrefaceIntroductionChapter 1: James D. Lilley, University at Albany, SUNY, USA - Being Singularly Impersonal: Jonathan Edwards and the Aesthetics of ConsentChapter 2: Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt University, USA - Melville's Creatures, or Seeing OtherwiseChapter 3: Paul Grimstad, Yale University, USA - On Ecstasy: Sharon Cameron's Reading of EmersonChapter 4: Johannes Voelz, Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt, Germany - The Recognition of Emerson's Impersonal: Reading Alternatives in Sharon CameronChapter 5: Vesna Kuiken, Columbia University, USA - On the Matter of Thinking: Margaret Fuller's Beautiful WorkChapter 6: George Kateb, Princeton University, USA - Reading NatureChapter 7: Branka Arsic, Columbia University, USA - What Music Shall We Have? Thoreau on the Aesthetics and Politics of ListeningChapter 8: Kerry Larson, University of Michigan, USA - Hawthorne's Fictional Commitments: The Early TalesChapter 9: Theo Davis, Northeastern University, USA - Hawthorne's Rage: On Form and the DharmaChapter 10: Shira Wolosky, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel - Formal, New, and Relational Aesthetics: Dickinson's MultitextsChapter 11: Michael Moon, Emory University, USA - Beyond Sense: Portraits and Objects in Henry James's Late WritingsChapter 12: Shari Goldberg, University of Texas at Dallas, USA - Believing in Maud-Evelyn: Henry James and the Obligation to GhostsChapter 13: Mark Noble, Georgia State University, USA - The Ends of Imagination: Stevens' ImpersonalNote on ContributorsIndex