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Ralph Waldo Emerson's transatlantic relations: romanticism and the emergence of a self-reliant American reader
Get PDFThis thesis explores three of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal texts, Nature
(1836), the “Woodnotes” poems (1840, 1841), and Representative Men (1850), in a
transatlantic Romantic context. Augmenting typical transatlantic explorations of
Emerson’s literature which often use these three works in demonstration of the
various European Romantic assimilations n Emerson’s writing, the texts considered
in this study are understood to engage with one British work predominately.
Emerson engages antagonistically in the pages of Nature with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1825), in the “Woodnotes” poems with William
Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), and in Representative Men with Thomas
Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841).
In each instance, Emerson engages with a text that he understands to be
particularly representative of the intellectual and creative genius that its British
author wields and, as such, one that is anxiety-inducing in the influence that it
wields. This thesis demonstrates that, in engaging with these works, Emerson
performs with increasing sophistication a process of “‘creative reading,’ that is, an
act of reading (influx) through which creation (efflux, expression) is made possible
through a transcendence of the past. In doing so, Emerson confronts and attempts
to gain independence both from the personal influence that these texts and, more
significantly, their authors wield.
In engaging in Nature, the “Woodnotes” poems, and Representative Men
with Aids to Reflection, The Excursion, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic
in History respectively, Emerson assimilates into his works various elements of
Coleridge’s, Wordsworth’s, and Carlyle’s thought. Each of the three chapters
comprising this thesis explores Emerson’s intellectual indebtedness in this regard
and, as such, the explorations incorporate a scholastic focus like that found in the
majority of Emersonian transatlantic scholarship. In each instance, however,
explorations of Emerson’s works also reveal the American writer’s performance of a
liberating act of detachment or departure from the ideas with which he engages.
These intellectual detachments distinguish Emerson’s thought from that of
Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle, and are often attended by formal departures
from the texts with which Emerson engages. Augmenting typical transatlantic
explorations of Emerson’s works, this thesis focuses not only Emerson’s Romantic
assimilations, but also on his detachments.
Finally, in each instance, Emerson’s confrontations reflect Robert
Weisbuch’s assessment in Atlantic Double-Cross (1986) that nineteenth century
Anglo-American literary relations are ‘always more than personal and individual’
(21). That is to say, in each instance, Emerson confronts not only Coleridge,
Wordsworth’s, and Carlyle’s personal creative and intellectual influence, but their
extrapersonal or national influence as British writers. This confrontation of national
influence is reflected in the fact that Emerson’s detachments incorporate temporal
reimaginings, re-visions of time that nullify the potency of the past and of the
influence wielded by tradition by emphasising the present and the future, focusing
on the subjective power of the mind. As such, Emerson’s conceptions of time
demonstrate a conflation of two specifically American understandings of
temporality as defined by Robert Weisbuch – vertical time and futurism – both
developed by nineteenth century American writers in order to nullify the influence
of Old World, specifically British, tradition, and to establish an account of time in
which the United States’ comparative lack of distinct cultural history is excused.
In precis, this thesis demonstrates that Nature, the “Woodnotes” poems,
and Representative Men issue from Emerson’s creative reading of Aids to Reflection,
The Excursion, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History respectively.
These acts of creative reading demonstrate in each instance the inextricability of
Coleridge’s, Wordsworth’s, and Carlyle’s ‘personal’ creative and intellectual
influence, as well as their ‘extrapersonal’ or national influence
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Imagination and Growth: Coleridge and Wordsworth in Germany (1798-99)
Get PDFOn 16 September 1798 the packet boat with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, and his Nether Stowey friend John Chester on board sailed from Yarmouth
to arrive in Hamburg three days later (Frank 220). Behind Coleridge and Wordsworth lay the
year of shared creativity that Wordsworth refers to in the lines quoted above (Owen 270), and
that culminated in the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, published in Britain on 4 October
1798 (Gill Oxford DNB), a mere two weeks after its authors had disembarked in the German
Hanseatic city. Before Coleridge and Wordsworth lay a long, fiercely cold winter of
separation; the Wordsworths spent it in Goslar, a decaying medieval town in Lower Saxony,
whereas Coleridge and Chester first stayed in Ratzeburg and then, in February 1799, moved
on to the then thriving university town of Göttingen. While Coleridge was learning German
and coming into close contact with German academia, the Wordsworths lived a secluded life
in Goslar. Here, Wordsworth sought to compose The Recluse, his intended poetical
masterpiece which envisaged Coleridge as a contributor of thought (Wu 189; 448), and which
may have taken their shared creativity to a new level. Nevertheless, Wordsworth found
himself unable to prolong this joint creativity through writing The Recluse in the absence of
Coleridge, in whose company he had spent “virtually every day” of the preceding year (Wu
189). Instead, Wordsworth began his lasting poetical venture The Prelude – and, in that same
narrow space and timeframe – composed the majority of the “Lucy Poems” (300; 326; 356).
These poems will be referred to in inverted commas, since Wordsworth never grouped them
as such; Victorian scholars initiated the grouping that has led to the modern canon (Jones 7).
This paper focuses on how the months in Germany – from September 1798 to late April
1799 in Wordsworth’s case, and to July of the same year in Coleridge’s – influenced the
poets’ joint as well as individual creativity. The paper’s central claim is that Wordsworth
invented the character of Lucy in order to voice his anxiety about the endangered mutual
creativity in Coleridge’s absence, and that the “Lucy Poems,” just as The Prelude, address
Coleridge. The “Lucy Poems” complement and extend The Prelude; they leave Wordsworth
with the composition of The Prelude as his poetic collaboration with Coleridge comes to an
abrupt halt, while the “Lucy Poems” also pick up the reader where The Prelude leaves them,
namely at the point in Wordsworth’s poeticised autobiography where he is about to meet
Coleridge, and where their collaboration is about to begin. In all her luminous imagery, Lucy
is the poetic personification, the enlightening “Phantom” of Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s
shared creative imagination behind the Lyrical Ballads that the poets envisaged to grow into
The Recluse; she is the “happiness” of “that summer” of 1798 in The Prelude’s “Book
Fourteenth.
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Rethinking the concept of obscenity: the erotic subject and self-annihilation in the works of Blake, Shelley and Keats
Get PDFThis doctoral thesis aims to examine how certain sexual images and
motifs commonly deemed “obscene” are represented as a unique aesthetic
phenomenon in the works of English Romantic poets, William Blake, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. It can be observed that sexual desire
becomes an emblem that the Romantics use to rebel against political and
religious oppression and to establish individual subjectivity free from the
restraint of scientific rationalism, further accessing a transcendental state of
the “Poetic Genius.” Departing from the long-established readings of sexual
desire in the Romantic poetry, this thesis first situates the idea of obscenity in
the historical contexts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to
reconceptualise it as an alternative form of aesthetics of self-annihilation
correlated with the sublime. In the main chapters, by exploring the oft-ignored
dark and violent aspects of eroticism in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of
Albion and Milton, Shelley’s The Cenci and Laon and Cythna, and Keats’s
“Isabella” and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” I argue that “obscenity” emerge in
English Romanticism as a unique aesthetic phenomenon of self-annihilation,
particularly empowered in the experiences of sex, religious ecstasy, and
poetic creation itself. The research results of this thesis delineate that in the
works of these poets, religion, art, and eroticism form an essential trinity in
the human psyche that constantly seeks to build, reshape, escape from, and
eventually destroy existing identities. It also epitomises the desire to go
beyond the status quo and the ordinary experience of limited selfhood. An
examination of this heterogeneous trinity provides an alternative angle to
approach other canonised literary works of English Romanticism and explore
within them the elements that are “less canonised” and “obscene.”
Furthermore, it resonates with the recent studies that have highlighted the
material and somatic aspects in the Romantic poets and their works
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