There were two quotes that stuck out to me while I was reading “The American Scholar.” The first relates to the question of what Emerson argued for and what he argued against. As we discussed in class, Emerson was critical of capitalism which I found very apparent in a quote on page 211 where he stated, “But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that is is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, –a good ginger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.” I find this quote extremely interesting because it argues that capitalism doesn’t just detract from someone, it actually makes them not a whole man by boiling down their entire being into a trait or job. As if it is cutting a person up until they are no longer recognizable as a whole person and become something else entirely.
The second quote I find interesting more because I am a lit major than anything else. As someone who studies books from other ages his comment that “each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this” stuck out to me (Emerson, 213). I think as a lit major I spend a lot of time with the so-called “books of an older period” and I feel as if a lot of emphasis is placed on them and their value to us as a society, but there is significantly less focus on the books from our generation that will be passed down. Maybe that is a thought that might appear more in a creative writing class, rather than a lit class, but I still find it interesting that we spend so little time comparatively on contemporary novels. There are often few courses offered on present-day novels and its something I’d never really thought much about before.
Great points, Kathleen. As I said in class, the irony of teaching Emerson, who more or less argues for ditching the past, is powerful. And he’s certainly right that we have to pay attention to the contemporary world. My sense of why literary studies focuses so much on the past is that it’s because:
1) we don’t know yet what contemporary literature really matters. There’s so much new stuff coming out all the time. How do you choose? Much easier to select works to teach that others have long found interesting and ‘good’.
2) More profoundly, focusing on the present is a little like just focusing only on yourself. It can be a form of narcissism. One (and one’s generation) can easily think that we are the first to have experienced x, and that makes us special, while in fact lots of generations have experienced x, and many have come up with good ideas about how to deal with it, explore it, explain it.
There are many other points and ideas in this perennial debate between and about the ancients and the moderns, but these are the first two that leap to mind.