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.

Branka Arsic is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, USA. She is the author of On Leaving, A Reading in Emerson (2010) and The Passive Constitutions, 71/2 Times Bartleby (2007). She has co-edited (with Cary Wolfe) a collection of essays on Emerson, entitled The Other Emerson (2001).

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.

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

Index