DOCUMENTARY FILMS
Six documentary feature films in
The University Press of Kentucky
2011, 312 pp.
including
14 newly commissioned essays
Invited Lecture at Le Moyne College
Syracuse, New York
Directed a Colloquium on Emerson and Nietzsche in Big Sky, Montana
Essay
Seeing Metaphors
in
EMERSON FOR THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Global Perspectives on
an American Icon
Barry Tharaud, editor
University of Delaware Press (2010)
OTHER WORK
Article
The Limits of Instruction:
Pedagogical Remarks on
Lars von Trier’s
The Five Obstructions
Vol. 13 (2009)
Film and Philosophy
Special Edition:
Teaching Philosophy
Through Film
Essay
Rethinking the First Person
Autobiography, Authorship, and the
Contested Self in Malcolm X
in
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIKE LEE
Mark T. Conard, editor
The University Press of Kentucky (2011)
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILMS
created as Coordinating Producer and Consulting Editor
with Academy Award nominated
Director William Jersey
and
Master Cinematographer Robert Elfstrom
I was chosen by Werner Herzog to participate in his roving educational experiment for the cinematic spirit—Rogue Film School.
RFS is Herzog’s personal, peripatetic, clandestine workshop devoted to the character of one’s soul, the nature of ecstatic truth, the possibility of aesthetic ecstasy, and honestly facing the reality of one’s “inner landscapes.”
Essay
Note to Self:
Learn to Write Autobiographical Remarks
from Wittgenstein
in
WITTGENSTEIN READING
Daniel Steuer, Wolfgang Huemer, and Sascha Bru, eds.
De Gruyter (2013)
Created with ColdWater Media
Article
The False Pretender
Deleuze, Sherman, and
the Status of Simulacra
The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism
Vol. 69, No. 3 (Summer 2011)
Available
with a preview of content at
Essay
“A Lead Ball of Justice”
The Logic of Retribution and
the Ethics of Instruction
in True Grit
Article
Still, Standing
Anonymous Desire and Unarticulated Threat in
Julian Hibbard’s The Noir A-Z
AFTERIMAGE
The Journal of Media Arts and
Culture Criticism
Vol. 38, No. 5
March/April 2011
Essay
The Ethics of Contracts,
Conscience, and Courage in
The Insider
in
THE PHILOSOPHY OF MICHAEL MANN
Aeon Skoble, Steven M. Sanders, and
R. Barton Palmer, editors
The University Press of Kentucky (2014)
OTHER VOLUMES
Afterword
Out of Nowhere
Remarks on Julian Hibbard’s
Existential Graphs
in
SCHEMATICS: A LOVE STORY
Julian Hibbard
Buzz Poole, editor
Mark Batty Publisher, New York
Reviewed on:
Edited Volume
Estimating Emerson
An Anthology of Criticism
from Carlyle to Cavell
Edited with an Introduction
and Annotations
by
David LaRocca
67 celebrated writers
174 years of criticism
736 pages
Bloomsbury 2013
Article
Not Following Emerson:
Intelligibility and Identity in the Authorship of Literature, Science, and Philosophy
Vol. LIV, No. 2, Winter 2013
James B. M. Schick, editor
Podcast
Everyone’s Autobiography
Remarks on Anxiety and Pseudonymity
in the work of
Soren Kierkegaard and
Charlie Kaufman
The New York Public Library
South Court Auditorium
February 16, 2012
Article
The Education of
Grown-ups
An Aesthetics of Reading Cavell
The Journal of Aesthetic Education
Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer 2013)
An earlier version of the essay was presented
at the conference “Wittgenstein Reading”
Universiteit Gent (Belgium)
June 25, 2010
Article
Performative
Inferentialism
A Semiotic Ethics
Liminalities
A Journal of Performance Studies
Vol. 9, No. 1 (2013)
Essay
Reading
Cavell
Reading
Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film:
The Idea of America
ed. Andrew Taylor and Aine Kelly (2012)
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
Introduction to Book
Cresting:
A Series of Remarks on
Takashi Homma’s New Waves
New Waves 2000-2013
Photographs by Takashi Homma
September 12 - October 26, 2013
Opening Reception:
Thursday, September 12th, 2013 6-8 pm
The artist will be present
Location:
Longhouse Projects
Hudson Square
285 Spring Street
(between Hudson & Varick)
New York, NY 10013
“This immensely learned, deeply thoughtful and far-ranging book helps re-situate Emerson in his own time, and in ours. More than just a work of scholarship, it rises to the level of philosophical investigation. It is also witty, playful and, in its own strange way, original.”
— Phillip Lopate
editor of Writing New York and The Art of the Personal Essay
Director of the Graduate Program in Nonfiction, and Professor
Columbia University
“In this elegantly written, scrupulously researched book,
David LaRocca has convincingly demonstrated that, rather than locating a restricted area of inquiry, Natural History constitutes the grounding precondition for Emersonian thinking. [. . .]”
— Donald E. Pease
Professor of English and the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Dartmouth College
“David LaRocca treats Emerson's English Traits with the philosophical seriousness and sophistication the book has long deserved, but never before so richly received. [. . .] This is a valuable contribution to the re-assessment of Emerson's most neglected work, and a distinctive example of creative hermeneutical engagement.”
— Neal Dolan
Associate Professor of English, University of Toronto
“In this wonderful book,
David LaRocca illuminates Emerson's mind by, in effect, pursuing his methods. LaRocca's treatment of English Traits is no mere academic summary. [. . .] With a vast range of reference, running from Wittgenstein to Darwin and from Coleridge to Montaigne, and an engagingly 'album'-like structure, the book traces Emersonian connections between topics as remote as the origins of evolutionary theory, the making of commonplace books and the rise of the American anti-slavery movement. It offers a glitteringly many-sided examination of the evolution of Emerson's deeply creative mind in its efforts to arrive at an understanding, not only of England, but also of the nascent American culture that it was in process of helping to form.”
— Bernard Harrison
Emeritus E. E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy,
University of Utah and
Emeritus Professor of the Humanities, University of Sussex
Bloomsbury 2013
408 pp.
“In this finely crafted and highly original piece of scholarship, LaRocca not only draws attention to one of the most neglected texts in Emerson’s oeuvre, he also presents an extended and insightful meditation on the nature of metaphor and the formation of cultural identity. Like a true florilegium, the collection of remarks continuously surprises—but not with gimmicks, rather with the kind of uncanny observations the method of criticism and arrangement is meant to illuminate. Combining literary sensibility with philosophical acumen, Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor also prompts urgent and serious reflection on the relation between literature, philosophy and natural science more generally. Its publication is, therefore, as timely as Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, and should be greeted with just as much applause.”
— Mario von der Ruhr
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Swansea University, Wales, and
Associate Editor of the journal Philosophical Investigations
Essay
Affect without Illusion
The Films of Edward D. Wood, Jr.
After Ed Wood
in
THE PHILOSOPHY OF TIM BURTON
Jennifer L. McMahon, editor
The University Press of Kentucky (2014)
Italian philosopher, novelist, and editor of
I Have a Book in the Head (Ho un Libro in Testa)
The Philosophical Side of American Literature
Il lato filosofico della letteratura americana
November 13, 2013
Read the interview in Italian online
or click to the left for a copy in English
Interviewed by
Silvia Bellia
A Review from Choice:
“With this study, LaRocca emerges as a theorist as well as an important scholar of Emerson in an age when ‘theory’ has become a footnote. His recent edited volume Estimating Emerson (Choice, Nov 2013, 51-1329), which offers cultural/philosophical reflections on Emerson, and his essay "Performative Inferentialism: A Semiotic Ethics" (published in the February 2013 issue of the journal Liminalities) testify to this. The present study stands alone in its treatment of the little-studied English Traits (1856), though LaRocca pays due diligence to the studies that have preceded his. His key concern is how to read Emerson historically (in terms of 19th-century metaphors of natural science) while appreciating him ‘transcendentally’ (as a method of thinking in the 21st). This study performs the Emersonian inheritance of analogy, of seeing the one in the many. In studying English Traits, LaRocca looks at journals, figures, sentences, and paragraphs occurring throughout his essays, and offers reflections on Emerson and the ‘nature’ of metaphor. This study should be read by those who think themselves comfortable with Emerson, and by those who feel abandoned by theory. Mostly, though, this should be read by those who are in interested in figuring the thought that lies beyond reach.”
Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
— R. T. Prus
Professor and Chair of English, Humanities, and Languages
Southeastern Oklahoma State University
MOST RECENT MONOGRAPH
Editor of Volume
The Philosophy of War Films
“A significant contribution to not only the philosophy of the war film but also to philosophy of film itself.”
“The essays are fresh and surprising.”
“Written by an outstanding array of international scholars.”
“Important and timely.”
“Connecting the reality of war with the art of filmmaking.”
“Rich and deeply thought-out consideration of the representation of war on film.”
“[LaRocca] makes many insightful observations, especially over the relation between the truth of war and the images of
war on screen.”
Edited Volume
Essay
We Were Educated for This?
Paideia, Agonism, and the Liberal Arts
in
GIRLS and PHILOSOPHY:
This Book Isn’t a Metaphor for Anything
Richard Greene and Rachel Robinson-Greene, editors
Open Court (2015)
Edited Volume
Emerson’s
Transcendental Etudes
30 years of
Stanley Cavell’s essays
on Emerson
Edited with preface, annotations,
a general index, and
a citation index
Stanford University Press 2003
in the series
Cultural Memory in the Present
edited by Hent de Vries and
Mieke Bal
From a review in American Literary History:
“In making a new case for the philosophical sophistication of English Traits, LaRocca has achieved his own Emersonian feat, the creation of a new ‘atmosphere in which to think’.”
— Jacob Risinger
Assistant Professor of English, The Ohio State University
To read the full review in ALH Online Review click below:
From a review in the Journal of American Studies:
“I imagine David LaRocca having fun composing this book—not because it is in any way frivolous or frolicsome (chapter 1 is titled ‘More Prone to Melancholy’) but because it is an engaging experiment in criticism, an attempt to perform literary study in such a way as to bring its subject to life. [. . . A ] florilegium such as Emerson’s, such as LaRocca’s, emits a kind of ‘bouquet,’ and ‘atmosphere in which to think.’ The patient reader, the reader willing to make ‘interpretive shifts,’ a reader capable of ‘loyalty to the present’ and of reinforcing ‘an openness to the complexity of emerging phenomena,’ will find that atmosphere by turns exhilarating, confusing, enticing, and drowsy with the hum of bees. Nevertheless, the reader must grant that removing Emerson’s writing from a museum and placing it in a florilegium does wonders for its constitution.”
— T. S. McMillin
Professor of English, Oberlin College
To read the full review in the Journal of American Studies
click the cover to the right:
Interviewer
Equivalent Simulation
A Conversation with John Opera
AFTERIMAGE
The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism
John Opera is an American photographer who works at the intersection of photographic materiality and light-derived abstraction.
Vol. 42, No. 6 May/June 2015
Director of Documentary Film
Brunello Cucinelli:
A New Philosophy of Clothes
Official Selection of the
New York City
International Film Festival (premiere)
New York City
Independent Film Festival
NewFilmmakers New York
at Anthology Archive
Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
Click on journal cover to read two articles
on Cucinelli in
The Journal of Religion and Business Ethics Vol. 2 (2015)
2013, 38 min.
“This tactfully edited, helpfully annotated collection of essays
makes available a body of work, developing over thirty years,
in which Stanley Cavell has argued the case for Emerson as a
serious philosopher.”
— Stephen Mulhall
Professor of Philosophy, Oxford University
in the Times Literary Supplement
“This is the definitive anthology on America’s premier man of
letters — Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
— Cornel West
Class of 1943 University Professor, Princeton University
The Messenger (2009)
dir. Oren Moverman
June 15
Return (2011)
dir. Liza Johnson
July 20
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)
dir. Werner Herzog
August 17
BHS related events include presentations by
Sebastian Junger (Restrepo, The Last Patrol) and
Phil Klay (Redeployment)
15 contributors
538 pages
in Mark Conard’s series
The Philosophy of Popular Culture
University Press of Kentucky
2014
Coeditor of Volume
A Power to Translate the World:
New Essays on Emerson and
International Culture
with Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso
The impact of global thinkers on Emerson; Emerson’s impact on global thought
“Emerson was always a transnational thinker, and in this respect as in others, we have yet to catch up with him. This fine, wide-ranging volume will be of considerable help. These essays bring one to Emerson from, and allow one to travel out from his texts towards, a variety of geographical, cultural, and disciplinary regions, often in surprising ways.”
— Russell B. Goodman
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
“The essays gathered in this superb collection testify to the centrality of the historical and political to [Emerson’s] thinking. Indeed, Emerson here emerges as a truly international writer who himself thought in a setting that far exceeded the boundaries of the national.”
— Branka Arsic
Professor of English
Columbia University in the City of New York
“[The book] invigorates by means of sudden discoveries, cross-connections, overlaps, gaps, as each of these ‘prismatic’ essays reflects the question afresh.”
— Laura Dassow Walls
William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English
University of Notre Dame
[access the full review by clicking below]
18 contributors
339 pages
in Donald Pease’s series
Remapping the Transnational:
A Dartmouth Series in
America Studies
Dartmouth College Press
University Press of New England
2015
Podcast
Building a Brand with
Bricks and Beliefs
J. P. Kuehlwein interviews David LaRocca
Book Event:
Cornell University
Department of English
Contributors gather to
discuss the volume.
Please join us.
April 29, 2016
Friday, 4:30-7pm
Goldwin Smith Hall
English Lounge
One of Emerson’s “most astute interpreters . . . LaRocca consistently challenges the limits of academic categorization.”
“Rather than argument, the book is a smart, exciting demonstration of Emersonian thinking and a way to approach his work by its affiliations—to other Emerson texts and to texts by others—and ‘to make allusions coalesce.’
Learned, daring, and lively, LaRocca’s book is the most provocative treatment of Emerson this year.”
— Robert D. Habich
Professor of English, Ball State University
Past President of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society
Former Editor of the Emerson Society Papers
from American Literary Scholarship (2013) 3-21
Interviewer
Of Photographing in Ice
A Conversation with Julian Hibbard
AFTERIMAGE
The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism
Julian Hibbard is a British photographer and author who has published The Noir A-Z:
A Modern Abecedary (2009) and Schematics:
A Love Story (2011). LaRocca discusses the earlier projects and picks up with Hibbard in the midst of his latest body of work, Transference.
Vol. 43, No. 6 May/June 2016
LATEST VOLUMES
Editor of New Volume
The Philosophy of
Documentary Film:
Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth
Editor of New Volume
The Bloomsbury Anthology of
Transcendental Thought:
From Antiquity to the Anthropocene
31 contributors
644 pages
in Mark Conard’s series
The Philosophy of Popular Culture
Rowman & Littlefield
2017
85 iconic philosophers & writers
848 pages
Bloomsbury Academic
2017
“This anthology is a gem! . . .
Get it for yourself and see!”
— Thomas E. Wartenberg
Mount Holyoke College
The Philosophy of Documentary Film is a welcomed addition to the scholarly study of a mischievous praxis—one that continues to expand, contract, merge, and mangle in its attempts to explore versions of “real life” on film. Periodic, thoughtful reflection on this rogue form is necessary, and this book provides it. The leading lights of nonfiction film scholarship are well represented, and especially pleasing to me, as a documentary filmmaker, is the fact that documentarians have also been enlisted to write about our craft. Furthermore, just for good measure, The Dogma 95 Manifesto is included as both a beacon and dangerous shoal to filmmakers exploring the choppy waters around the fiction/nonfiction whirlpool. Great idea!
— Ross McElwee
Director, Sherman’s March, Bright Leaves
Professor of the Practice of Filmmaking, Harvard University
“An impressive selection, including some of the most interesting voices in documentary thought.”
— Jonathan Kahana
University of California, Santa Cruz
“A marvelous collection that promises to inform the teaching of nonfiction film for years to come.”
— J. P. Sniadecki
Director, The Iron Ministry
Northwestern University
“Timely. Vital. Engaging. An essential companion to any thinking about documentary cinema. David LaRocca is especially attuned not just to the voices at the heart of theoretical debates but, to my liking, also to those who push out into the practice and craft of documentary filmmaking.”
— Paul Cronin
School of the Visual Arts
“This is the collection of essays on documentary film that I have been waiting for. It brings together many of the best classic pieces on documentary theory and practice and a thrilling assortment of new essays by philosophers, films scholars devoted to aesthetic issues and close reading, and documentary filmmakers who teach. The writing throughout is of the highest order, and the promise of genuine (as opposed to tinkertoy) philosophical inquiry is amply kept. LaRocca has done an exemplary job of editing, and his lengthy overview essay which serves as the volume’s introduction is incisive and indispensable.”
— George Toles
University of Manitoba
“These works in hand are contemporary perspectives on, for me, the most vibrant practice in contemporary cinema. They call us to think carefully and seriously not only about the truth claims and strategies of specific documentary films but also about why documentaries are so central to our age.”
— Timothy Corrigan
University of Pennsylvania
“With the pervasive and facile use of digital manipulation of images in public and private communications, few questions are more important than the question raised by this richly rewarding book—‘What is real and what is fake?’”
— Bill Jersey
winner of two Peabodys, Emmys, and Oscar nominations
“From considerations of Plato to Cavell and well beyond, these memorable essays fruitfully explore both truth and make-believe in documentary film, as well as the manifold challenges of discerning the elusive differences between them.”
— Lawrence Rhu
University of South Carolina
Podcast
On Cucinelli’s New Philosophy
of Clothes
Marc Vander Maas interviews David LaRocca
for RadioFreeActon
For a list of available titles visit:
David LaRocca Books
Essays:
Errol Morris:
Re-enactment and Reconception
and
Sofia Coppola:
Fame and Self-Reference
American Independent 3
John Berra, editor
Intellect Books (2016)
Article
Teaching Without Explication:
Pedagogical Lessons from Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster
in The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Emperor’s Club
in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC)
Eamonn Dunne, editor
No. 10 (2016)
Essay
The Last Great
Representative
of the Virtues:
MacIntyre after Austen
Jane Austen and Philosophy
ed. Mimi Marinucci (2016)
Great Authors and Philosophy Series
Essay
Hunger in the Heart
of Nature:
Werner Herzog’s Anti-Sentimental Dispatches from the American Wilderness (Reflections on
Grizzly Man)
Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture
ed. Richard J. Schneider (2016)
Essay
Emerson Recomposed:
Nietzsche’s Uses of His American
‘Soul-Brother’
Nietzsche and the Philosophers
ed. Mark T. Conard (2017)
Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Philosophy
Ecocritical Theory and Practice
in the updated edition of
THE PHILOSOPHY OF
THE COEN BROTHERS
Mark T. Conard, editor
The University Press of Kentucky (2012)
US
Japan
“In this brilliantly edited and introduced anthology, David LaRocca presents us with the broadest selection of authors, philosophers, visionaries, and artists, who have expressed the simple, difficult truths of the transcendental in the most profound and varied of ways.”
— Hent de Vries
Russ Family Professor in the Humanities
and Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University;
Director of The School of Criticism and Theory
Cornell University
“Edited with great erudition and care by David LaRocca, the collection will be an indispensable handbook for anybody researching the heritage of that tradition.”
— Branka Arsic
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University in the City of New York
“[This] volume is more than an overview of a field of study—it is participating in the creation of one.”
— Todd May
Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities
Clemson University
“LaRocca assumes more the guise of a curator than an editor, and provides us with a veritable Kunstkammer, that is, a cabinet of curiosities, a theater of memory, a world theater of philosophers, artists, and writers from all ages who have addressed the transcendental as a constant and elemental aspect of philosophy and life.”
— Gregg Lambert
Dean’s Professor of Humanities
Syracuse University
“A splendid collection of some of the deepest thoughts of which humans are capable. The book is full of insights and surprises.”
— John Lachs
Centennial Professor of Philosophy
Vanderbilt University
“A timely, provocative conversation seeking further to characterize Emerson’s bearing toward the world beyond the US.”
— Christopher Hanlon
Professor of English
Arizona State University
[access the full review by clicking below]
LaRocca offers a synoptic anthology of essays that brings to our attention how war films can provoke contemplation and meditation because of the ways that such films inevitably focus on the mortality and vulnerability of human beings. The essays, written by an outstanding array of international scholars, work out various ways in which the genre can compel our thinking to become philosophical. This collection of essays constitute a significant contribution to not only the philosophy of the war film, but also to philosophy of film itself.
-- Daniel Flory, Montana State University
This volume offers rich and deeply thought-out consideration of the representation of war on film and of the ways filmic and now digital representation is deeply entangled with how we experience and think about war (up close or at a distance) in actual life. The book reaches back in film history but is especially provocative on war and its representation in the last decade—the situation we are living with now. The essays are fresh and surprising, showing the whole subject of war and film to be far more interesting, complex, and disturbing than in the standard thinking about war genre films that we are used to.
-- Charles Warren, Boston University
War is a pervasive condition, a constitutive part of human experience. The war film genre is extensive and multiform. It is no surprise, then, that war films are provocations to philosophical thought. This important and timely edited collection has an extensive introduction that seeks answers to vital questions: What sort of a phenomenon is a war film? What do we think we mean when we speak of a war film? What are war films for? Can war as such be represented by film? The essays that follow illuminate myriad ethical, aesthetic, epistemological and ontological issues as they related to a broad range of representations of war.
-- Guy Westwell, Queen Mary University of London
The philosophical reflections compiled in this book look at war films from a variety of perspectives. I commend editor David LaRocca for bringing together scholars who each, in different ways, engage the interdisciplinary mission of the inquiry into how war is depicted on screen. What is the philosophy of film, and then, of war films specifically? Do war films harbor a philosophy – of death, violence, love… - or does philosophy enrich the understanding of the cinematic of war? The Philosophy of War Films explores these questions and many more, connecting the reality of war with the art of filmmaking.
-- Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam
Invited Book Review
Cinematic Ethics:
Exploring Ethical Experience
through Film
Robert Sinnerbrink
Routledge 2015
Vol. 79, No. 1 Winter 2017
Essay
The Ballad of
Boba Fett:
Mercenary Agency and
Amoralism in War
in
The Ultimate Star Wars
and Philosophy:
You Must Unlearn
What You Have Learned
Jason T. Eberl and Kevin S. Decker, editors
Wiley Blackwell (2016)
Curator and Moderator of Film Series
Three Film Screenings and Discussions
about Cinematic Representations of
Veterans Returning from the War Front
to the Home Front.
Presented during the summer of 2015
at the Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn NY 11201
Interviewer
Art-as-Activism and
Public Discourse
A Conversation with Diane Bush
AFTERIMAGE
The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism
Diane Bush is an American photographer and author of Warheads (2006). LaRocca discusses Bush’s long career of using photographic and image-based art for the purposes of political agitation and social critique.
Vol. 44, No. 4
January/February 2017
Essay
Memories.
In the End, Is That
All There Is?
in
Downton Abbey and
Philosophy:
Thinking in that Manor
Adam Barkman and Robert Arp, editors
Open Court (2016)
article published in conjunction with an exhibit and installation
co-curated with Mark Morris in
the Department of Architecture, Art, and Planning at
Cornell University
Article
Legocentrism
in The Senses and Society
Michael Bull and David Howes, editors
Vol. 12, No. 11 (2017)
For this title in the "Re-Mapping the Transnational" series, LaRocca (College at Cortland, SUNY) and Miguel-Alfonso (Univ. of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) have gathered 17 essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson and his relationship with the literatures across, and between, national boundaries. As a product of the 19th century, Emerson was very much interested in international cultural relationships. This is evident in the essays detailing his interest in Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and India. Yet, as the books in the Dartmouth series propose, the concept of the "transnational" attenuates the role of imperialism and globalism in the critical discussion, cf., essays detailing Emerson's influence on Maurice Maeterlinck, Vicente Huidobro, Rainer Maria Rilke, and others. For the most part, the essays here achieve both perspectives as they uncover the international influence on, and by, Emerson, and establish Emerson's transnational influence on later literature and philosophy. The essays are arranged in four categories: "Emerson beyond Borders in His Time," "Emerson and Global Modernity," "Emerson and the Far East," and "Emerson and the Near East." Although these essays are genealogical and trace influences, they simultaneously call into question origins, intention, and cause and effect. As this collection attests, Emerson is as important in an age of globalization as he was in an age of colonization.
Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
— R. T. Prus for Choice Reviews
Professor of English
Southeastern Oklahoma State University
A Power to Translate the World brings together the expertise of established and emerging Emerson scholars to offer seventeen new readings of both “Emerson’s incorporation of international culture and his effect on international culture” (24). Convinced that Emerson can be understood only with the help of an approach that extends beyond the explanatory framework of the nation, the volume’s contributors challenge and refine recent transnational and global interpretations of the Emersonian canon. [...] Refreshingly skeptical about the heuristic potential of the transnational as an analytical tool, LaRocca and Miguel-Alfonso advance something of a post-transnational argument in resurrecting the “perhaps old-fashioned” category of the “international” (6.) [...] In addition to reviving the international as a category, LaRocca and Miguel-Alfonso also make a plea for the rehabilitation of influence studies, seeking to extend its scope from the study of “direct evidence of reading” to a more conjectural engagement with less obvious forms of intellectual cross-pollination [...]
— Tim Sommer for Emerson Society Papers (vol. 28, no. 1)
University of Heidelberg
Essay
Dualing
Conceptions
of History
in
Hamilton and
Philosophy:
Revolutionary Thinking
Aaron Rabinowitz and Robert Arp,
editors
Open Court (2017)
Essay
“Memory Man”:
The Constitution of
Personal Identity in Memento
The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan
ed. Jason T. Eberl and George A. Dunn
Lexington Books of Rowman & Littlefield (2017)
Article
Translating Carlyle:
Ruminating on the Models of
Metafiction at the Emergence
of an Emersonian Vernacular
in
Special Issue of Religions
Kenneth S. Sacks and
Daniel Koch, editors
(2017), vol. 8., issue 8
Click here for full article
Essay
The European Authorization of American Literature
and Philosophy:
After Cavell, Reading “Bartleby” with Deleuze, then Rancière)
Melville Among the Philosophers
ed. Corey McCall & Tom Nurmi (2017)
Afterword by Cornel West
Essay
Cults of
Authenticity
in
The Americans and
Philosophy:
Reds in the Bed
Robert Arp and Kevin Guilfoy,
editors
Open Court (2018)
Article
Shooting for the Truth:
Amateur Documentary Filmmaking, Affective Optics,
and the Ethical Impulse
in Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities
Dan Geva and Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan, guest editors,
Vol. 36, Nos. 2 & 3 (2017)
from the Afterword by
Cornel West
ed. Corey McCall & Tom Nurmi (2017)
© 1998-2018 David LaRocca & David Justin Hodge. All rights reserved.
“In his famous story of Bartleby, we get Melville’s silences at the center of the U.S. capitalist machine—Wall Street. In David LaRocca’s fascinating essay, we see how the French philosophers—Deleuze and Rancière—have delved deep into the bowels of this Melville narrative. LaRocca shows that the profound radical and subversive silences in America’s greatest literary artist have been rendered silent by American philosophers. And just as Nietzsche’s love of Emerson helped authorize and legitimize Emerson for some American philosophers (despite James and Dewey’s magnificent centennial Emerson essays in 1903!), so Deleuze and Rancière may do the same for Melville. Needless to say, Sartre’s love of Faulkner did not do the job in the 1940s. Yet with the creative genius of Stanley Cavell, the Emerson revival in some precincts of philosophy was secured. [...]
LaRocca’s elegant plea for American philosophers to engage Melville’s art—as some do Nietzsche’s Zarathustra—is a cry of the heart and a call for Socratic questing. His acknowledgement “that American Letters (whether as Philosophy or Literature) has daddy issues” echoes Emerson’s “American Scholar,”—a call for cultural independence and intellectual courage. Yet nearly two hundred years later, LaRocca ponders whether we still have anxiety about our origins and get “caught up in schizophrenia, or more simply of madness.” Must we end where we began, that is, end with our near madness to engage and embrace our great literary artist just as we began with Melville’s near madness in a culture of his day hostile to his genius? I think not.
We are on the verge of a major renaissance of philosophic probings of Melville—similar to that of the Emerson revival of thirty years ago.”