Emerson and the Art of the Diary


Book Description

An extended literary description and analysis of Emerson's journals, which argues that these works constitute one of the greatest commentaries on 19th century America, realizing Emerson's standards of literary excellence more fully than his other writings.




The Super Life of Ben Braver


Book Description

It all started with a peanut butter cup . . . which leads Ben Braver to a secret school for kids with super abilities. Ben has never had any special powers—and maybe never will. But could this be his chance to become the superhero he's always dreamed of? Packed with black-and-white art and comic strips throughout, The Super Life of Ben Braver is the first book in a hilarious adventure series about the greatness that lies within any middle schooler who dreams big from Marcus Emerson, the author of the smash hit Diary of a 6th Grade Ninja series.




Daybook


Book Description

A beautiful new edition of the cult classic that counts Zadie Smith and Rachel Kushner among its fans – with a new introduction by Celia Paul. ‘I am an artist. Even to write it makes me feel deeply uneasy.’ Renowned American artist Anne Truitt kept this illuminating and inspiring journal between 1974-8, determined to come to terms with the forces that shaped her art and life. She recalls her childhood on the eastern shore of Maryland, her career change from psychology to art, and her path to a sculptural practice that would ‘set colour free in three dimensions’. She reflects on the generous advice of other artists, watches her own daughters’ journey into motherhood, meditates on criticism and solitude, and struggles to find the way to express her vision. Resonant and true, encouraging and revelatory, Anne Truitt guides herself – and her readers – through a life in which domestic activities and the needs of children and friends are constantly juxtaposed against the world of colour and abstract geometry to which she is drawn in her art. Beautifully written and a rare window on the workings of a creative mind, Daybook showcases an extraordinary artist whose insights generously and succinctly illuminate the artistic process. 'Truitt wrote as she sculpted, returning to the past again and again to find fresh truths.' The New Yorker ‘This miracle of a book will inspire artists for generations to come.’ Celia Paul




First We Read, Then We Write


Book Description

Writing was the central passion of Emerson’s life. While his thoughts on the craft are well developed in “The Poet,” “The American Scholar,” Nature, “Goethe,” and “Persian Poetry,” less well known are the many pages in his private journals devoted to the relationship between writing and reading. Here, for the first time, is the Concord Sage’s energetic, exuberant, and unconventional advice on the idea of writing, focused and distilled by the preeminent Emerson biographer at work today. Emerson advised that “the way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.” First We Read, Then We Write contains numerous such surprises—from “every word we speak is million-faced” to “talent alone cannot make a writer”—but it is no mere collection of aphorisms and exhortations. Instead, in Robert Richardson’s hands, the biographical and historical context in which Emerson worked becomes clear. Emerson’s advice grew from his personal experience; in practically every moment of his adult life he was either preparing to write, trying to write, or writing. Richardson shows us an Emerson who is no granite bust but instead is a fully fleshed, creative person disarmingly willing to confront his own failures. Emerson urges his readers to try anything—strategies, tricks, makeshifts—speaking not only of the nuts and bolts of writing but also of the grain and sinew of his determination. Whether a writer by trade or a novice, every reader will find something to treasure in this volume. Fearlessly wrestling with “the birthing stage of art,” Emerson’s counsel on being a reader and writer will be read and reread for years to come.




The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau


Book Description

Most people who care about nature cannot help but use religious language to describe their experience. We can trace many of these conceptions of nature and holiness directly to influential nineteenth-century writers, especially Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). In Walden, he writes that "God himself culminates in the present moment," and that in nature we encounter, "the workman whose work we are." But what were the sources of his religious convictions about the meaning of nature in human life?




The Diary


Book Description

The diary as a genre is found in all literate societies, and these autobiographical accounts are written by persons of all ranks and positions. The Diary offers an exploration of the form in its social, historical, and cultural-literary contexts with its own distinctive features, poetics, and rhetoric. The contributors to this volume examine theories and interpretations relating to writing and studying diaries; the formation of diary canons in the United Kingdom, France, United States, and Brazil; and the ways in which handwritten diaries are transformed through processes of publication and digitization. The authors also explore different diary formats, including the travel diary, the private diary, conflict diaries written during periods of crisis, and the diaries of the digital era, such as blogs. The Diary offers a comprehensive overview of the genre, synthesizing decades of interdisciplinary study to enrich our understanding of, research about, and engagement with the diary as literary form and historical documentation.




Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism


Book Description

Mary Moody Emerson has long been a New England legend, the "eccentric Calvinist aunt" of Ralph Waldo Emerson, wearing a death-shroud as her daily garment. This exciting new study, based on the first reading of all her known letters and diaries, reveals a complex human voice and powerful forerunner of American Transcendentalism. From the years of her famous nephew's infancy, in both private and published writings, she celebrated independence, solitude in nature, and inward communion with God. Mary Moody Emerson inherited both resources and constraints from her family, a lineage of Massachusetts ministers who had earlier practiced spiritual awakening and political resistance against England. Cole discovers a previously unexamined Emerson tradition of fervent piety in the ancestors' own writing and Mary's preservation of their memory. She also examines the position of a woman in this patriarchal family. Barred from the pulpit and university by her sex, she also refused marriage to become a reader, writer, and religious seeker. Cole's biography explores this reading and writing as both a woman's vocation and a gift to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Helping to raise her nephews after their father's death, Mary Moody Emerson urged Waldo the college student to seek solitude in nature and become a divine poet. Cole's pioneering study, tracing crucial lines of influence from Mary Emerson's heretofore unknown texts to her nephew's major works, establishes a fresh and vital source for a central American literary tradition.




In the Face of Adversity


Book Description

In the Face of Adversity explores the dynamics of translating texts that articulate particular notions of adverse circumstances. The chapters illustrate how literary records of often painful experiences and dissenting voices are at risk of being stripped of their authenticity when not carefully handled by the translator; how cultural moments in which the translation of a text that would have otherwise fallen into oblivion instead gave rise to a translator who enabled its preservation while ultimately coming into their own as an author as a result; and how the difficulties the translator faces in intercultural or transnational constellations in which prejudice plays a role endangers projects meant to facilitate mutual understanding. The authors address translation as a project of making available and preserving a corpus of texts that would otherwise be in danger of becoming censored, misperceived or ignored. They look at translation and adaptation as a project of curating textual models of personal, communal or collective perseverance, and they offer insights into the dynamics of cultural inclusion and exclusion through a series of theoretical frameworks, as well as through a set of concrete case studies drawn from different cultural and historical contexts. The collection also explores some of the venues that artists have pursued by transferring artistic expressions from one medium into another in order to preserve and disseminate important experiences in different cultural settings, media and arts.




The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture


Book Description

Uncovering Islam's little known yet formative impact on U.S. literary culture, this book traces genealogies of Islamic influence that span America's earliest generations, reaching from the Revolution to Reconstruction. Excavating personal appeals to Islam by pioneering national authors-Ezra Stiles, William Bentley, Washington Irving, Lydia Maria Child, Ralph Waldo Emerson-Einboden discovers Muslim discourse woven into the familiar fabric of unpublished letters and sermons, journals and journalism, memoirs and marginalia. The first to unearth multiple manuscripts exhibiting American investment in Middle Eastern languages and literatures, Einboden argues that Islamic precedents helped to prompt and propel creativity in the young Republic, acting as vehicles of artistic reflection, religious contemplation, and political liberation. Intersecting informal engagements and intimate exchanges, Islamic sources are situated in this timely study as catalysts for American authorship and identity, with U.S. writers mirroring the defining struggles of their country's first decades through domestic investment in the Qur'an, Hadith, and Persian Sufi poetry.




Apropos of Something


Book Description

"Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin's sweeping cultural history of a key shift in consciousness: the arrival, around 1800, of "relevance" as the means to grasp how something previously disregarded becomes important and interesting. At a time when so much makes claims to attention every day, how does one decide what is most valuable right now? This is not only a contemporary problem. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the question for the nineteenth century was how, in the immensity and "succession" of objects, anything becomes a proper object of experience. How that question was finally defined as one of relevance is the story of Apropos of Nothing. Relevance, Tamarkin shows, was primarily an Anglo-American concept. It engaged major intellectual figures, centrally the pragmatists-William James, Alain Locke, and John Dewey-and before them thinkers including Emerson and Alfred North Whitehead. Most of all, relevance was a problem for the worlds of art, literature, education, and criticism. These were fascinated by how old, boring, distant, or unfamiliar things get taken in; how they are admitted as meaningful; how they come home to us like the ludicrous raven comes to Edgar Allan Poe's student in the middle of the night in some obscure connection with himself. Many nineteenth-century American artists saw their paintings as pragmatic works that make relevance-that suggest versions of events that feel apropos of our world the moment we see them. (Tamarkin's book is richly illustrated, in color, with works by Winslow Homer, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Edgar Degas, and others.) Relevance remains a conundrum, especially for the humanities. It obliges us to say why we admit Poe's poem-or, say, a line of Emerson's-is interesting enough to study it, to dedicate ourselves to understanding it, to affirming that this effort is, in Emerson's words, "relevant to me and mine, to nature, and the hour that now passes.""--