American Studies Association of Turkey

Abstract

Throughout his career, Friedrich Nietzsche constantly read the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Despite only rarely referencing Emerson directly, Nietzsche’s copies of Emerson (in German translation) were heavily annotated and frequently perused. This fact is all the more remarkable since although Nietzsche famously soured on his other mentors—Schopenhauer, Wagner—he never stopped reading Emerson. In my paper, I highlight this relationship to analyze the phenomenon of re-reading: the shifting reception of a text by an ever-changing reader. Beginning with Emerson’s concept of “creative reading” from his 1837 lecture “The American Scholar” and what Henry David Thoreau says about “heroic reading” in Walden (1854), I show how a text’s meaning relies on the reader’s reception as much as it does on the creative writer. This mode of reading is what Ross Posnock and Richard Poirier call “troping,” or what Jane F. Thrailkill has more recently described as “play.” However, I argue that Emerson’s re-readability originates in his aphoristic mode, an open-ended style that encourages readers to become co-writers and co-inquirers. Receptive readers thus expand centrifugally from Emersonian ideas, drawing—as Emerson writes in his 1841 essay “Circles”—new, spiraling “circles” of thought. In other words, Emerson’s short, suggestive lines demand continual re-reading or “rumination,” which is Nietzsche’s description of the “art of the aphorism” in The Genealogy of Morals (1887). Ultimately, I suggest that aphoristic rumination, or re-reading, is a fundamental feature of the nineteenth-century American essay, where suggestive short forms demand continuous attention from receptive readers.