Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 2, August 2005
Special Issue: Literary Universals
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Joel Porte. Consciousness and culture: Emerson & Thoreau reviewed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. xix, 234 pp. ISBN 0-300-10446-4 (hardback; $36.00).
Reviewed by
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) are considered to be two of the giants of nineteenth-century American literature. Given that Emerson was the benign mentor to Thoreau the eager disciple, they also marked their friendship and relationship as bitter rivals. Emerson was America’s foremost literary statesman during his lifetime, highly protective of his reputation, while Thoreau was an ambitious and often defiant protégé. This book of essays by Joel Porte focuses on Emerson and Thoreau through their body of writings, examining points of intersection and diversion, while illustrating how their concept of “self-culture” helped to guide New England nineteenth-century readers from their provincialism into the broader area of international politics and relationships.
Each of the twelve chapters in Porte’s book were developed over the course of his career, and have been rewritten and refined for this publication. Chapter 1 on “Emerson, Thoreau, and the Double Consciousness,” examines how Emerson and Thoreau lived in the mundane world of the “understanding” and the more exalted world of “the soul.” Chapter 2 titled “Transcendental Antics” was produced in part from the author’s 1960 dissertation and first book Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict. “The Problem of Emerson,” chapter 3, was published in Uses in Literature in 1973. Chapter 4, “Representing America,” was delivered at the Boston Public Library in April 1982 commemorating the centennial of Emerson’s death. “Emerson as Journalist,” chapter 5, was read at a Modern Language Association panel in 1984, and “Emerson at Harvard,” chapter 6, was delivered in September 1986 at a commemoration of Harvard College’s 350th anniversary. Chapter 7, “Holme’s Emerson,” was written as an introduction to a new edition of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Emerson’s French Connection,” chapter 8, appeared as an article in Q/W/E/R/T/Y in 2002. In chapter 9, “Henry Thoreau and the Reverend Poluphloisboios Thalassa,” the author begins to focus on Thoreau. This chapter originally was written in 1973 for the book The Chief Glory of Every People. “Society and Solitude,” chapter 10, was read at the University of Houston in 1967 and published in a journal in 1973. “’God Himself Culminates in the Present Moment’: Thoughts on Thoreau’s Faith,” chapter 11, was read in July 1978 at a Thoreau Society annual meeting and later published in the Thoreau Society Bulletin. Chapter 12, “’In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World’: The Natural History of Henry David Thoreau,” was a lecture delivered in September 1997. Finally, in chapter 13, “Writing and Reading New Englandly,” the author provides a short concluding essay on the previous chapters and insights, drawing together his years of study and research on Emerson and Thoreau’s relationship and writings, and providing a kind of summary to his life’s work.
Overall, this is a book that contains a combination of previously published and previously delivered scholarship, by a well-known and established scholar on both Emerson and Thoreau. While it is a collection of essays on the relationship and writings of these two great American figures, it is also a one-stop compilation of the thought and intellectual activity of Joel Porte. In that sense, aficionados of Emerson and Thoreau research have the best of both worlds with this book of essays.