I'm assuming this piece is ironic...?

You don't want to teach Emerson because of his "ego" which means that his work "finally leaves us frustrated, confounded, and sputtering before a class of students." Surely, in this instance, the ego problem is yours?

While I agree his writing seems deranged at times, I think it's probably a mistake to think of it as prose. It's poetry, isn't it?

Thanks for a delightful article. Back in grad school, in the '80s, I remember dozing off in the theater department's green room as I tried, tried, tried to focus on Emerson on a sunny afternoon. Of course, at the time, in my mid-twenties, I thought my lack of comprehension meant I was somehow lacking. Now, I can chuckle and proclaim with confidence, "Give me Mark Twain any day!"

There are two problems evident with the two of you. First, you want to synthesize Emerson. That's impossible. If you were worth your salt as teachers, you would make this clear to your students at the outset. Emerson is the gift for a lifetime. He shocks and disturbs; To paraphrase the master, he breaks the monotony of a decorous age. It is just short of a tragedy you too neophytes don't realize this. And it is an immense travesty that the Chronicle of Higher Education lowered itself to publish such gibberish as you put forth. Second, you mount your first shots against Emerson's ego, never for a second realizing that this is one of his central points. He is attempting to give voice to ego, to the ego of all persons. He speaks to a central ethos of American society, democracy. Where, for example, does Emerson engage in the kind of character assassination you employ to discredit him? Where does Emerson make such condescending assumptions about what his readers can or cannot understand as you do about the undergraduates so unfortunate to have you as their professors? It is the two of you who are possessed of the montrous egos you try to fend off on Emerson. You either cannot engage with him or you refuse to, so you must find a way to dismiss him. You should both be fired and send back to undergraduate school yourselves.

I also hope that this piece was ironic...Emerson saved me this summer when I was rebounding from a job loss. My academic administrative position was eliminated on June 15th. Two months at my mother's lake in wisconsin and emerson revived me.

I'm glad to see someone stepping up to complain about the apparent desire to baffle people and call it "profound." It is a grave disservice to the reader and it happens most often in poetry, but also in prose.

I just had the misfortune of trying to teach "Self-Reliance" to a freshman writing class. As I read it before class, I had the same aversion and disgust the authors of this article note. My students don't need any more support for the already self-absorbed fantasies they carry around with them every day. So, in my class, we spent our time ripping apart Emerson's narcissistic fantasies and subjecting them to the scrutiny allowed by reading "The Souls of Black Folk" right beside. Let's keep reading Emerson--in order to neutralize his ranting.

Emerson himself thought that Emanuel Swedenborg may have been the greatest mind of the age, and (with due respect to the theologian) perhaps Emerson's own legacy in American Studies will one day be similar to Swedenborg's. Even Matthiessen (in 1941) noted that Emerson's importance lies more in his influence than in any actual work. However, for those studying 19th-century literature, that alone is reason enough to study Emerson; one needn't lionize the writer in order to teach him.

What is wrong with the Chronicle these days? Printing mean jokes from ignoramuses instead of thoughtful essays is not what we need right now.

Funny, I must have much more intellectually accomplished students at the community colleges I teach at, because when I teach Emerson, they often say that his was the easiest of all the essays assigned to understand -- and then the discussions we have about it prove them correct.

Now, I do not deny that there is difficulty in Emerson -- but that difficult is one of the things that make him great. He is reread with great benefit. And the fact that Nietzsche proclaimed him one of the great thinkers and one of his greatest influences should solidify his standing forever.

This call for getting rid of Emerson because he is a bit difficult -- meaning you have to work to read him and get the full depth and breadth of meaning of his works -- shows just how dumbed-down our educational system has become. And, worse, it shows that it's because of what is happening at the top. If the universities won't have high standards, the high schools will lower theirs.

First we had to endure one Carlin Romano's wish-it-were ironic diatribes against Heidegger, and now this. What's up with the Chronicle? I'm not going to cancel my subscription or anything, but jeez.

Anyone who reads "Self-Reliance" as bolstering Gen-Y (or whatever) students' arogant self-importance simply does not know how to read, for "Self-Reliance" is a complex and conflicted undoing of the idea of an isolated subject or self who needs only to affirm himself in order to live happily.

And: 19th century prose is often convoluted to the 21st century ear. Perhaps the authors should develop a Google translation program so they don't have to do all the work involved in reading it.

Indelicately written, to say the least. While many of the author's points are true -- Emerson certainly is preachy and wordy at times -- the article blatantly insults the spiritutal beliefs of approximately one billion Hindus with the statement "He apparently believes this rubbish about the godhead in each one of us . . ." Good scholarship never needs to cross a line such as this and directly insult the spiritual beliefs of an important and proud world culture. I was saddened to read this kind of vitriole in The Chronicle. I belive the article goes too far in this regard, and should be removed, and accompanied by an apology from the editors.

Loved this piece. I've written a book on Emerson, and most of my articles manage to draw on him in some way, shape, or form. So you might think I'd be in a lather about the can of whoop-ass these two have opened up and dumped on the Grey Eminence of Concord. But there's nothing particularly untrue or dishonest about this hilarious piece. He sure isn't for everyone, and there aren't many undergraduates around--if there ever were--who can extract much wisdom from Emerson's many-forked prose. Yet Emerson is capacious enough to contain his own bloat, which these authors rightly identify. And, please, to the readers who are getting exercised over this article as if God himself is being criticized, relax: Emerson can take it. After all, he was nothing, he saw all, and the currents of the Universal Being circulated through him. Probably still do. And that would by definition include this dissing by Major and Synche.

I hope this essay is ironic, in which case, still: it isn't funny.

If it's not ironic, well, why are you teaching a writer you don't understand? There are so many problems with the points you make in your article that it's not worth my time to attempt to respond. (Needless to say that your reading of Self-Reliance is superficial.)

If you want to understand a little better read Stanley Cavell's "Emerson's Transcendental Etudes".

"First we had to endure one Carlin Romano's wish-it-were ironic diatribes against Heidegger, and now this. What's up with the Chronicle?"

That was my first thought as well. It's sad when an author's failure to serve as a Self-Help Manual is taken for a literary deficiency. Self-reliance does not mean doing whatever Emerson tells you to do.

But even if a Bloomian "swerve" from Emerson is itself, well, Emersonian, it's even sadder when an essay as powerful and bleak as "Experience" evidently makes no impression on a glib reader.

I also take issue with this article. We're entering hazardous territory when we allow students and their (in)ability to understand a potentially difficult author to determine what is taught. It's setting the bar so low that even the lamest horse can clear it, which is, well, lame. I mean, really, can you imagine what a syllabus would look like if all writers considered too abstract, too verbose, too difficult to grasp immediately were excised from the reading list? If writers whose work bears no clear practical application to contemporary students' lives were ignored? Literature, literary theory, philosophy, theology, and a host of other fields would almost cease to exist.

PS-WTF is up with The Chronicle?

"I think the peculiar office of scholars in a careful and gloomy generation is to be (as the poets were called in the Middle Ages) Professors of the Joyous Science, detectors and delineators of occult symmetries and unpublished beauties; heralds of civility, nobility, learning and wisdom; affirmers of the one law, yet as those who should affirm it in music and dancing; expressors themselves of that firm and cheerful temper, infinitely removed from sadness, which reigns through the kingdoms of chemistry, vegetation, and animal life." - RWE

Youse guys ain't.

I'm no scholar or student of Emerson (I had a brief encounter with him in Grade Ten during the American Lit. year of my high school's English programme). Nor am I a student or scholar of Heidegger. Despite this (or perhaps because of this), I find the two articles in question quite refreshing for their presence, if not always convincing on particular points. NO subject should be above criticism, nor should individuals like Emerson and Heidegger get free passes simply because they are considered "great" by some. While I am not in a position to judge the merits of the critiques offered here of Emerson (or of Heidegger in the other article), I find it quite disturbing that each of them has such thin-skinned defenders. amcmurray (in post #12) displays the healthiest attitude towards this piece. And even if the authors are entirely wrong in each and every point they make, that they stir discussion and raise the question "should Emerson be held in such esteem" is, in itself, a worthwhile result. The most superficial and error-filled critique (if indeed this one can be fairly characterized as such) is preferable to the notion that some figures are beyond reproach. Besides, each of these articles has piqued my interest in both Heidegger and Emerson--something nothing else has managed for over 20 years. So neither piece was entirely a wasted effort.

It is certainly realistic to argue that the average college freshman is unprepared to handle the abstractions of Emerson. The typical business or chemistry major would be better served in the required Humanities unit by stepping-stones to abstraction. Not by dumbing down the curriculum, but by meeting students where their intellects ARE and then leading them to something deeper. To start in the depths is to risk losing them forever.

This is a no-brainer, eg., in a foreign language class. "Wo ist Monica?" is appropriate there. Kant in the original is not.

The analogy holds true for most students, for whom Emerson is akin to a foreign language.

So, Emerson offers "no practical guidelines for actual human behavior." And Thoreau is great because he teaches us about beans.
Moby-Dick, of course, is a manual on whaling.

You two should be teaching shop, not literature.

This article is littered with several insipid arguments against the teaching of Emerson.

Yes, his essays sometimes read like sermons, perhaps best explained by the fact Emerson was trained as a preacher. How you can mistake this for "ego" is beyond me.

Yes, his essays are difficult, but certainly not beyond the range of any undergraduate who logs off Facebook long enough to try. In my opinion Emerson is no more difficult than Melville, and his writings are no more sleep-inducing than Melville's cetology chapters.

Yes, his essays are filled with optimism. This no true argument AGAINST him. Is it a requirement, in light of the more recent moral failures of our species, that all authors portray only the worst of which we are capable instead of the best? While he may not have experienced trench warfare or a Nazi death camp, he was well aquainted with enough personal tragedy to drive anyone to despair. The deaths of his brothers, his beloved first wife, and his son were crippling blows. He did not get over these easily. Yet Emerson manages find hope in nature, in himself, and in humanity. He writes of our potential, of what we might become with some effort. We should be turning to Emerson and those like him to help us overcome the worst parts of ourselves. How in the world can you think that he has nothing of value to offer? I can't tell you the number of times I've had to tell myself, "Up again, old heart."

Perhaps the saddest argument you make is based on Emerson's inconsistency. A demand for consistency from an author allows for no growth, education or increased wisdom on the author's part. Emerson wrote his essays over the course of a lifetime, and his views necessarily changed somewhat based on his life experiences. Do you expect him to be as optimistic after the death of Waldo as he was before? He was not, and justifiably so. You speak of the ways in which to read Emerson in a survey course, none of which are particularly useful. Emerson should be taught with a biographical perspective. Emerson's writings are the story of man struggling to find a means for hope, both within himself and without, in the face of staggering personal loss. How is it possible that you think this story has no relevance to your students?

You two may be professors, but you are no American Scholars. I hope your students read your article and recognize your incompetence.

P.S. Your comparison of Emerson to Thoreau is both flawed and unfair. Flawed because Thoreau's writings, while more readable, are vastly more disorganized than Emerson's, and because Thoreau's willingness to end an essay on a broad poetic statement, while artistic, offers us no explanation and little education. Unfair because Thoreau moved in with Emerson's family years before he built his cabin. He not only modeled his thoughts after Emerson's, but also his patterns of speech and physical mannerisms. No one is more responsible for Thoreau's writings than Emerson. As Emerson told Thoreau, "I know your thinking, Henry, because it is my own."

If we didn't already have the word "tendentious" we would have to invent it to describe this article. No doubt the authors will be happy at the imputation: they clearly set out to shock and amuse and must have had a high old time of it trying to top each other's zingers over a bottle of bourbon.

As his defenders have noted, Emerson can be a soft target. Thoreau is the better writer, certainly. And it isn't hard to caricature Transcendentalism as mystical mush.

But the article veers between hogwash and character assassination--especially where it implies that "Self-Reliance" is the founding text of "Me Decade" narcissism. Making a serious criticism of so transparent a bid to astonish us is probably a mistake, but I will point out that Emerson cannot be judged fairly if his critics altogether omit the historical context from their evaluation: Emerson WAS a radical--a bracing antidote to Calvinist platitudes, a foe of conformity at a time when conformity was stifling in a way that is unimaginable in those of us who inhabit an era that shallowly celebrates "transgressiveness." Emersonian optimism may seem silly if plucked out of his essays and put on Hallmark cards, but it was a startling rejoinder to orthodox Protestant believers in our "total depravity." As a result of his genuine radicalism, Emerson became himself the all-important context for Thoreau and many another great writer.

Iconoclasm can be good fun, and there is nothing amiss in sticking a pin in the hot air balloon of abject Emerson-worship. An entire course in Emerson is a fearful undertaking. But these authors take it too far. Many contributors to these comments have worried about the classroom competence of these professors--with good reason, if they are regarding their article as anything more serious than a vaudeville routine.

"we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable..."

I don't know, sounds a bit like Wittgenstein if you ask me, and how bad can that be? But I've never read him, so maybe they're right and he's a complete waste of time.

I read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in undergrad philosophy. It's not easy, but full of meat. It's stayed with me for 30 years.

Emerson, too, has stayed with me -- for different reasons. This windbag's bloviations are just Old-Style New Age efflation, spoken in the private language of a crank. He feigns deepness and delivers obscurantism, pushing a philosophy which, if stripped of fog, would fit in an e-mail for ego enlargement. Our 21st century students really don't need all this 19th century gas about reified abstractions, given in capital letters as if they were dieties.

Let students who wish to achieve higher plains of mushy thinking do it on their own time.

The University of Hartford should abolish tenure.

What hot, steaming, philistine horse manure. The first Emerson sentence quoted contains an obvious typo (or unintended omission); the second is more recondite, but is still parsable with a little readable effort. (Does anyone bother to teach close reading in Eng. Lit. anymore?)

What Emerson sermonized about in "Self-Reliance" (and elsewhere) was the farthest thing from today's rampant "culture of narcissism." (Read the surrounding essays on character, etc., if you don't believe me.)

The authors overlook that RWE was one of the most learned and cosmopolitan Americans of his time and a "multiculturalist" one at that. (Thus his openness to Eastern mysticism, however unfortunate its effects on his philosophizing.) But then, what the authors apparently cannot abide is the soaring transcendental dimension of RWE's thought. Instead they choose Thoreau's prosaic bean field. Bean-picking! (The triumph of the utilitarian mind-set is very much in evidence in this insipid rant.)

As for RWE's writing talents: Do the two high-horse-riding professors know, or care, that Emerson's words are cited in some 2,900+ entries in the complete OED, perhaps more than any other American author?

At all events, they should do their students, and English literature at large, a favor: quit teaching this archetypal American writer for whose "rainbow" of thought (in Melville's unfriendly characterization) they have no feel, and consequently no capacity for empathetic reading or teaching to others. Hie thee to thy bean fields forever.

"Emerson reminds us of the novitiate graduate student who attempts to write theory for the first time." Theory? We don't need no stinkin' theory!

Emerson saved me this summer after I lost my wallet on vacation and
experienced complications from too much Chef Boyardee
and Schlitz. I was outside my family's primitive cabin when I remembered I had brought Emerson along. Thank God I did! Emerson saved my life! Well, over the course of the weekend, it was
really the 1820-1865 section of Norton's. But Emerson was
a big part of that.

I would not trust the aesthetic sense of a professor who had never enjoyed reading Emerson. I say this bearing in mind the lapses into empty profundity pointed out by the authors of this piece. If you can't quite see the point to Emerson's philosophical meanderings, I would recommend Barbara Packer's book "Emerson's Fall," or Stephen Whicher's "Freedom and Fate." Unfortunately there is not, as far as I am aware, a good explanation available of Emerson's aesthetic achievement, which is his principle recommendation but has more in common with John Ashbery than with any philosopher.

If you two are too stupid to teach Emerson, you should have the decency to resign your positions. What you call Emerson being "crazy" is really just an incredibly wise and challenging writer outpacing and outmatching the various readymade "theories" you're throwing at him. You've brought a Nerf bat to a knife fight, is what it looks like to me. But what's really offputting about this article is the fact that you seem to delight in your own incompetence. Being willfully ignorant is one thing, but wearing that ignorance like a merit badge is something else again. Can you see Alaska from your back door, too?

You don't "like" Emerson--fine. I'm not asking you too. I'll even grant you he can be a pain in the ass sometimes--but most great writers can; you might even argue that it's one of the things that makes them great. Anyway, it's a big wide world out there, so teach Walden instead if that makes you happy. I can just imagine the post-Marxist "reading" of the line about beans. But the argument that your refusal or inability to locate the value in his work somehow means the work itself is without value is idiotic and, I suspect, disingenuous. Emerson's value is obvious to anyone who spends ten minutes with his prose. Even these nuggets you've carefully hunted-and-pecked to make your "point" (such as it is) clearly evidence the poetry and deep understanding of a superior mind hard at work on a craft at which he excells.

Next time, instead of ruining one of the great American essayists and thinkers for your undergrads, why don't you direct them to the Library of America edition of the essays? Douglas Crase's introduction to that book is as good a starting point for Emerson as they're likely to find--certainly head and shoulders above what you're peddling here. You might do yourself a favor and read it too.

I don't care if this piece is ironic or not. I am sick of people throwing around phrases like "schizophrenic prose" and terms like "crazy." It's offensive and it is not clever.

Lighten up people, this is funny. And honestly I could have written the same thing about Hemmingway.

Sadly unsurprised by this piece, which reveals nothing useful about Emerson but more than I care to know about what passes for expertise in many English departments today. These two probably find it heartening to know Andrews Norton is in their corner. Congratulations, guys, on bringing Emerson's academic reception full circle. What a glorious enterprise you've chosen...

... Right.

Anyway, here's a conversation between Chris Lydon and Harold Bloom on the phenomenon of Emerson-haters: where they come from, what they are, etc.

http://www.radioopensource.org/the-harold-bloom-tapes/

Enjoyed reading the article, especially the excited comments about it, and chuckling over both. I'm moved to dust the old man off and give it another try. The authors should send this piece off to New Yorker and make some $$$

I've been hearing a lot about the decline of tenure, and how its demise should be hastened. I've tended to agree with this view, but after reading many of these comments, I'm starting to change my opinion. It boggles my mind that serious scholars react to an essay with cries of "you should be fired." I expect this reaction from non-academic critics, but not from academic professionals. Whether the article is tendentious, satirical, ignorant, brilliant or over the top, we must assume it represents the writers' thinking. We do well to critique it; we fail if the best we can do is demonize the authors.

For me, the question is not "What is wrong with the Chronicle?" but "What is wrong with many of its readers?"

It boggles my mind that you apply the term "serious scholars" to commentors and forget all about the authors. There's more sense in these comments than there was in that article, which I still hope was an attempt at humor. So, it's ok to relegate Ralph Waldo Emerson to the trash heap, but to suggest these two halfwits should lose their jobs is off limits. They shouldn't lose their jobs because they criticized an icon, they should lose their jobs because they are unqualified and ignorant.

SHOOT BUT NOT TO KILL ....
It misleads to dismiss Major and Sinche as "ignoramuses" as #8 does or dismiss their piece as "gibberish" as #3 does, but Major and Sinche drew an unnecessary curricular conclusion from their own point that a multiple Emerson (of equivocal significance) exists (and thus they got their pedagogical message miixed up). A gulf exists between saying that we should no longer privilege an author (or certain works of his) and calling for the ditching of such an author. Major and Sinche hardly used any ad hominen nor did they shoot from the gutter as Carlin Romano tried to do with Heidegger. Lastly, nothing in Major and Sinche's critique surprises me at all (or should surprise many others) since this kind of criticism has always more or less been a part of evaluative works on Emerson and other writers in general.(Dr. Okhamafe)

SHOOT BUT NOT TO KILL ....
It misleads to dismiss Major and Sinche as "ignoramuses" as #8 does or dismiss their piece as "gibberish" as #3 does, but Major and Sinche drew an unnecessary curricular conclusion from their own point that a multiple Emerson (of equivocal significance) exists (and thus they got their pedagogical message MIXED up). A gulf exists between saying that we should no longer privilege an author (or certain works of his) and calling for the ditching of such an author. Major and Sinche hardly used any ad hominen nor did they shoot from the gutter as Carlin Romano tried to do with Heidegger. Lastly, nothing in Major and Sinche's critique surprises me at all (or should surprise many others) since this kind of criticism has always more or less been a part of evaluative works on Emerson and other writers in general.(Dr. Okhamafe)

The main problem (and I may be in the minority here)is assuming that an English professor has any business teaching Emerson. He is first and foremost a philosopher! Those who teach philosophy, and particularly those who would teacher Swedenborg, Kant, Soloviev, and more modern figures in the serious philosophical/occultist/mystical pot like Rudolf Steiner and Valentin Tomberg would more likely have the tools to unravel Emerson. Treating him merely as literature is doing him a disservice. If you want to teach Emerson and you are an English professor, read heralds of the American Spirit by John Fentress Gardiner... several times. rjs

Sorry, Heralds of the American Spirit by John Fentress Gardner (errors on title and author's name) published by Lindisfarne.

Comment 37 struck me when he said he wasn't surprised by anything they said. I wasn't surprised either, and that is part of the problem. These guys sound like two ultra conservatives writing in 1850, when there really was a kind of cult following for Emerson. But now? Is this cutting edge criticism? There is no cult. Most people don't even read Emerson, including it seems, the two authors of this article. The fact that there were two people writing it is hilarious, especially because instead of catching each others' errors they simply giggled and high-fived. Statements like this just kill me: "Melville wrote his own books, so why not just teach him and let Emerson fade into the background?" Well, Shakespeare wrote his own books too, so why don't we just let Melville and Emerson fade into the background? Hell, Homer wrote his own books too, so let's just let...

I gave Emerson the boot a couple of years ago and have happily never looked back. There are plenty of 19th century US writers that are more interesting (ie original - such as Melville), better prose stylists (Hawthorne), more influential (Whitman), able to speak to contemporary students (Douglass, Dickinson), wide-ranging and provocative (Marti, and, in fact, all of the above). Students who want to read him can find Emerson on their own.

The authors appear not to know the meaning of either "eponymous" or "peripatetic." Perhaps they shouldn't be teaching Emerson in the first place.

Warning: Emerson May Be Dangerous to Academic Careerists!
Clearly, those who would rarely, if ever, "go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways" will inevitably view Emerson as "crazy." Major and Sinche present a long, wind-baggish essay, the kind The Chronicle loves to publish (see the list I've compiled: www.theamericandissident.org/Cases/Chronicle2.htm).
One must wonder what inanity they teach their students, as in "go collegial and conformist, and speak the Democrat-Party PC-groupthink in all ways." No wonder the country continues its downward spiral.
G. Tod Slone, Founding Editor (since 1998)
The American Dissident, a Journal of Literature, Democracy & Dissidence
A 501 c3 Nonprofit Providing a Forum for Vigorous Debate, Cornerstone of Democracy
todslone@yahoo.com
www.theamericandissident.org
1837 Main St.
Concord, MA 01742

I find myself as in a teapot, screamed quietly over tea and crumpets lounging thickly upon the cushions of my soul. :-)

The dolor! The calor! Oh, my schizophrenic prose-thesis windward wanderers! The calor! The dolor!

Emerson! Wherefore art thou Emerson?! Interrabangily I beseech thee!

A little irreverence seems to me a good thing now and then. Imo Major and Sinche's attack on Emerson is about as therapeutic (and about as effective) as Ambrose Bierce's on Whitman, in The Devil's Dictionary:

incompassible (adj.) Incapable of existing at the same place and at the same time, as, for example, the poetry of Walt Whitman and God's mercy to man.

They just aren't so concise or funny.

To comment #35: You write, "Whether the article is tendentious, satirical, ignorant, brilliant or over the top, we must assume it represents the writers' thinking. We do well to critique it; we fail if the best we can do is demonize the authors."

Do you really mean that pure, unadulterated ignorance should be a legitimate part of academic discourse? All of the other descriptive terms are a legitimate part of argument, but don't we put our hats on each day to "fix" the ignorance?

BTW: I am all for keeping tenure, partly because of what you wrote, but don't let anyone keep their job if they show blatant ignorance of their field of endeavor(even if they do so with brilliance, tendentiousness, and satire)....

Comment 45 sounds like it was from one of the authors' students. Next they're going to make fun of Emerson because he was so stupid he didn't even know how to drive a car.

Good on ya, guys. You've said what I repeatedly stated in three decades of lectures. Emerson can't write a coherent paragraph, and his ideas are highly derivative.

I wish those who praise "The American Scholar" (which, incidentally, was the rubric for annual presentations to Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society) would read William Cullen Bryant's essays, written when Emerson was a student.

And Emerson's "Wealth" just might adjust the adulation of a few of his idolators.

The unquestionable and frankly tragic truth of the matter is that the authors simply do not understand Emerson. If they truly fathomed the purpose of a piece such as Self Reliance, they would see that its SIMPLE message is one that they SHOULD be instilling in their students: Think for yourself. The authors have interpreted this idea, most erroneously, as sugggesting that the individual is "the center of the world." Emerson states a very different position: that we essentially live false lives because we follow and trust the ideas and behaviors of others rather than being creative ourselves. The quote the authors use as proof of Emerson's colossal ego ("In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty")is again, simply a misreading (and, I might add, a misreading based upon a contemporary academic mistrust of the Individual). What Emerson is saying is that we all have great ideas on occasion, and we sometimes later see identical ideas in print by others; we recognize these ideas (having thought of them ourselves at one point), and perhaps lament that we did not trust ourselves enough to publish them. That is the gist--that we need to trust OURSELVES and OUR IDEAS more, that we need to stop relying so much on the ideas of others and see the great ideas within ourselves. To me, this seems a valuable lesson for students: Trust your ideas, get them out there. See what YOU can add to the discourse on a subject rather than simply agreeing with the statements of others. That doesn't mean do not listen to anyone but yourself--it means add your own voice to the discussion. Nowhere in the essay does Emerson promote the kind of egoism the authors suggest is there. Emerson's faith in the self is akin to Whitman's "Song of Myself"--see the richness that is within you, and yawp it over the rooftops. At the very least Emerson should be taught as an expression of 19th-century American Romantic thought (I do not agree with a previous poster who called Emerson a philosopher; he was not, in the technical sense). I am not an apologist for Emerson, nor an Emerson scholar; but I am someone who is disheartened by the academic trend of championing only the collective while discrediting anything that promotes the individualistic ideals of self-reflection. What this view misses is that if we all lived up to our potential as individuals (the idea of Emerson, Whitman, Wright), the life of the nation and the world would be that much intellectually and emotionally richer.

I really, really worry about higher education when too many people fail to find any humor in a humorous article, regardless of one's feelings about Emerson. For g*ds sake, take a deep breath, people. And to the Chronicle, these people have reacted like the Irish to Swift's little satire--please ignore them!

I stumbled upon Emerson's essays on my own during college and, apparently contrary to Major and Sinche's students, found them exhilarating, expansive, accessible and full of wisdom that continues to inform my thoughts on a daily basis.

That said, I fully appreciate the fact that intelligent people may have a different reaction. If that's the case for M & S, don't teach him--but I certainly hope they would at least point their students in his direction so as not to foreclose the opportunity for others to discover the same value in Emerson that I did.

“In fact, the eye, -- the mind, -- is always accompanied by these forms, male and female; and these are incomparably the richest informations of the power and order that lie at the heart of things. Unfortunately, every one of them bears the marks as of some injury; is marred and superficially defective. Nevertheless, far different from the deaf and dumb nature around them, these all rest like fountain-pipes on the unfathomed sea of thought and virtue whereto they alone, of all organizations, are the entrances.”

If "54" is correct that this is meant to be a Swiftian article, it's not particularly amusing or satirical, just designed to piss people off. As for me, I "really, really worry about higher education" when academics cannot write something even remotely amusing, just irritating rubbish such as this article.

"51," that is. Oops.

Major and Sinche remind me of Orwell's remark that what bothered Shaw about Shakespeare was essentially the fact that Shakespeare wasn't a Fabian. Nor is Emerson a twenty-first-century academic writer. Must be his fault.

For all I know this piece is satire so brilliant that its Swiftian mod prop gets mistaken for straight writing. For all I know Major and Sinche really do have as shallow a notion of Emerson as they seem to at face value. But I'm willing to bet that fifty or a hundred years from now Emerson will still be read, about as much or as little as he is today, when all the rest of us have long since been forgotten.

You have to hand it to Major and Sinche for provoking this avalanche of elegant and hilarious comments from people who, for better or worse, love literature passionately. If they can provoke undergraduates similarly all is not lost.

@amcmurray (12)-- "capacious enough to contain his own bloat" says it all. I am logging into Amazon right now to find your book on Emerson.

M.L.Grisanti

I find Emerson an inspiration. I teach him with ardor. My students who read SELF-RELIANCE in the survey of American literature find Emerson refreshing, even if the preacher-like quality of his writing weighs upon their modern minds.

These Emerson pundits are like the writers of the New Criticism who buried UNCLE TOM'S CABIN for about 5 decades. Mrs. Stowe has emerged reinvigorated and the New Criticism is simply another blip in academic literary history.

Emerson will survive because "Trust thyself" is like "Know thyself," an idea that is a living, breathing reality.

Do do do de da da da is all I have to say to you.

P.S. "I teach him with ardor"??? Good times.

There's a remarkable document at NYPL's Digital Gallery in Walt Whitman's hand documenting his reading of RWE's Essays: First Series (http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/?col_id=462). Enter M_1169328 in the search field.

"nuggets and first-class gems" in the book, Whitman says, "and not stingily bestowed." He also recognized the philosophical background of RWE's ideas in German romantic philosophy, specifically naming Fichte and Schelling as predecessors. Emerson used his knowledge of European philosophy to promote an intellectual and social agenda uniquely suited to American political ideals, resurrecting Puritanical notions of introspection and grace without the doctrinal baggage, and combining them with German Idealism to plot a new path for mental and spiritual development. In the 1830s he breathed new life into the authority of human conscience, which is ultimately the source of his many appeals to intuition, the moral sentiment, etc. This is quite the opposite, as maxjukes points out, of the undergraduate narcissism rued by the authors of this piece. I believe it is in "Self-Reliance" that RWE challenges readers to obey its dictates "for just one day," if we think it sounds self-indulgent. The mindless consumer society we live in is the one RWE foresaw and tried hard to prevent. Whitman's concluding words about the "soul-greatness eligible to almost every man and woman, high or low" reveal how intimately he recognized and identified with Emerson's intentions.

I hope Major and Synche will try again. Students respond positively to Emerson even at the survey level if you teach his writings in light of historical and intellectual contexts; and I've known many that find him transformative once they realize how powerfully relevant he remains to problems and mindsets we've inherited from industrialization and other cultural factors to which RWE was an early and thoughtful witness. To some of the resources recommended in comments I'll add Paul F. Boller's *American Transcendentalism: An Intellectual Inquiry" (1974), which includes good material on the German Idealist background.

Brilliant (tongue-in-cheek?) essay.

Some of the punches Major & Sinche throw are well-deserved, while others are low blows. I certainly agree that Emerson's egotism can be tiring, but I noticed that Major & Sinche leave the kid gloves on with Whitman, whose blimplike literary persona is so inflated it makes Emerson's look like a party balloon at the Macy's Day Parade.

I mean, come on, you have to put on serious airs if you're going to sell self-reliance and dispell the doom & gloom of Calvinism, don't you? Do we seriously believe that Emerson talked this way at parties? Or that Whitman, for that matter, went around telling people that every atom belonging to them also belonged to him? (Maybe that kind of pick-up line worked during the American Renaissance, but I doubt it would have any traction today. But I digress). In short, Major & Sinche could have given a better accounting of Emerson's rhetoric, and particularly the relation between Emerson's persona & his message--which yes, was "inconsistent," but wasn't throwing off a (foolish) consistency the point?

Of course, I should apply the same rubric to Major & Sinche that I have to Emerson. I seriously doubt that the authors will take their own advice and throw away Emerson for good. And, in fact, it's not difficult to detect in this polemic a certain cheekiness--and even, yes, an Emersonian spark. After all, the first person to tell us to give Ralph Waldo the boot was none other than Ralph Waldo himself, empowering us all, as individuals, to enjoy an original relation to the universe.

P.S. - For a terrific refutation of Major & Sinche, particularly their diatribe on Emerson's supposed inconsistency, see Hedwig Friedl's piece on "The Divinity School Address" in A New Literary History of America. Friedl beautifully articulates how Emerson uses the aphorism to create an auspiciously modern philosophy & worldview that inspired many of the major thinkers of the twentieth century.

http://atadbookish.blogspot.com/

I had the fleeting notion while reading that a bored Alan Sokal might have decided to peck away under double pseudonym, to see what he could kick up.

But assuming that's not the case, I'm wondering (maybe someone has already asked this, in some fashion; there are lots of comments):

How do we figure, then, because it would certainly seem a puzzle, that the guy who wrote so ably about beans-as-they-are also revered the thought and rhetoric of a schizoid, obscurantist purveyor of unreal freaky things? You'd think that once he got down to the clear fact of the beans, along with the woods and water and Nature stuff, he would have realized the folly of his love for such false, vacuous prose. Realized, that is, that he could have saved himself a lot of spilled time and just got down to it all, if only the crazed, bombastic man had never penned a word?

Actually, I think there may have been a few other somewhat famous and apparently deluded people in the 19th century who thought Emerson was cool beans, too. But I can't remember their names right now.

Good lord. From the hysterical responses to this article, I'm beginning to think Emerson might be the literary equivalent of the banks that are "too big to fail." Major and Sinche invoke humor to critique one of the major voices of American cultural history. Nothing more. I think Emerson can take it, which is more than I can say for the drama queens whose high dudgeon here makes for a hilarious read.

Pascal speaking for god wrote that you would not be looking for him if you did not already know him. As teachers know from experience, children who can formulate a question know what they are talking about and have already come quite close to the answer they seek.

"But we are only getting started. Of the many serious violations and petty criminalities in Emerson's vision, perhaps none is more egregious than his optimism. He apparently believes this rubbish about the godhead in each one of us, but such grandiose confidence in his fellows contravenes much that we know about human behavior. We only wish that Emerson could have witnessed the 20th century, its brutality, its murderous regimes, its epochal indifference to life."

If this article is funny, it's a kind repulsive, listless humor. If this article is satirical, it misses its mark entirely. I don't have a problem with attacking Emerson, attacking humanities departments - whomever - but this article just seems so... low.

Are the authors really knocking Emerson because he's too abstruse for undergrads? Is that his big flaw? Are they knocking him for writing essays like sermons? For actually believing the "rubbish" he writes? For having "grandiose confidence" in humankind instead of just nihilism? The man was a MINISTER - a radical one, for sure - but a minister nonetheless. This article is philistinism at its worst.

Dear Chronicle,

Appropriately enough, this essay reminds me of a great line from Emerson: "Every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right."

Even so, I'll begin with some additional quotes from the so-called sage of "optimism," who teaches students (according to Major and Sinche) that the world keeps getting better and that each of them is "the center of the universe":

**"The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines."**

**"Let us enter into the state of war.... This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection."**

**"If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day."**

**"I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation."**

**"Men do what is called a good action ... much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world."**

**"I suppose no man can violate his nature.... We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills."**

These passages (and many that I?ve cut from the list) are all from that early bit of puffery, "Self-Reliance." Even here -- not to mention essays like "Friendship," "Experience," or "Fate" -- Emerson presents a fairly harsh and demanding optimism, I would say. And any teacher who failed to get this across has, more or less, failed the text and failed his or her class.

Indeed, Major and Sinche even get their one quotation from "Self-Reliance" wrong.

Yes, in that famous opening, Emerson does insist that "in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." But the authors -- and, I assume, their students -- forget that Emerson is talking about the feelings we have in confronting our "rejected" thought, ideas from which we now find ourselves "alienated," claimed by another.

Self-reliance emerges, in this famous opening, not as a feeling of power and optimism and self-righteousness, but from an experience of shame and failure and cowardice. We encounter originality and "always hear an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may."

Moreover, we should remember that the person who feels admonished and ashamed in the essay's opening passage is Emerson.

I wonder if Major and Sinche ever share that feeling.

Emerson himself once said, "Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with their medals, swords and armorial coats, like the addressing to a human being thoughts out of a certain height, and presupposing his intelligence." Apparently the compliment was lost on the authors of this piece.

I can't tell you how DANGEROUS I think it is that the Chronicle printed this piece of trash, possibly giving the imprimatur of value to unabashed ignorance. It is typical of undergraduates to blame the author when they come across something they don't immediately understand ("I hate Henry James . . . He's so wordy!"), but God help us when their teachers join in their petulant hatred of hard work and learning.

Kudos to Major and Sinche for perceiving the emperor's nudity. In eight years of grad school the only time I ever failed to earn an A was in an Emerson seminar at Stanford where I dared question Waldo's genius. The unforgivable sin, it would seem, is pointing out that the invisible eyeball bit doesn't make sense.

...