Notes on Chapter One: “The Haunting of American Literature”

Fuller asserts that Emerson possesses what Derrida would call “spectrality”—the presence through textuality that eludes critical-interpretive closure, finitude, or resolution. This is what Fuller calls Emerson’s haunting, and key critics’ works in the proliferate American Studies movement—Van Wyck Brooks, F. O. Matthiessen, Perry Miller, Sacvan Bercovtich—are haunted as well by their attempts to “instrumentalize” Emerson’s American scholar.

The reason these attempts, according to Fuller, subject themselves to “haunting” (that is, why they are both perpetually poised for action and yet circumscribed and delimited) is due to the impossibility of Emerson’s textual aesthetic, which always, within itself, eschews decisive positionality. 

Fuller first locates Emerson’s development of his own aesthetic in the warring discourses of Jacksonian America. Further, he sees Emerson responding to the political rhetorics of party struggle and alliance (the Tory party being what would become the Democratic party and the Whig party being the conservative party of the elite). 

On the one hand, Emerson resisted the mobish mentality of the Jacksonians; on the other, he mined opportunity in discordance. Within Jacksonian discourses there was the possibility for America to rid itself of its dependence on English forms: “While sympathetic to the conservative ideals of a patrician stewardship then in the process of being reformulated by the Whig party, [Emerson] began increasingly to investigate areas of overlap and correspondence in his conception of self-reliant individualism and Jacksonian democracy” (9). 

Where Fuller goes with this is to locate a germane moment for Emerson, during the New York elections of 1834, in which he was transformed by the realization that rank partisanship had the unique power of representational force—a distinct, centrifugal ability to rally public sentiment. 

Fuller’s thesis is that Emerson reinfused American symbolic orders with a new aesthetic mode of representation that reached beyond political discourses, but borrowed from them. This is essentially the troping argument: the turning of the common phrase into an illuminative and dazzling defamiliarization. This is how Fuller theorizes Emerson’s aesthetic: that it is an aesthetic of “dislocation.”  

Fuller ends the chapter with a challenge to American studies to go beyond its traditional, primary modes of criticism: New Criticism and Historicism, encouraging us to look at the ways these two historical modes press open each other, because “The Emersonian revenant visiting American critics throughout the twentieth century is an admonitory presence that warns us, through literary language, that ideals, however seductive, always run the risk of pathology” (25).

Fuller jousts with the possibility of a poststructuralist reading of Emerson: an Emerson whose discourse is multivalent and contradictory and therefore resistance to previous notions of closure and possessing a anxiety of irresolution that poses exciting challenges for the contemporary reader.