Recent Past Conferences

Paper: “Aphoristic Re-Readings: Emerson, Nietzsche, and the Affordances of Short Forms”

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. 

Paper: “William James’s Anesthetic Reading: Open-Ended Interpretation on Nitrous Oxide”

Abstract

William James’s corpus is bookended by nitrous oxide. One of his earliest publications was a review of Benjamin Paul Blood’s The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy (1874), wherein Blood claims that the sensation of “coming to” out of nitrous oxide intoxication held ineffable truths for philosophy. In “A Pluralistic Mystic” (1910), the final essay published during his lifetime, James praises Blood’s ideas by stringing together open-ended readings of his various texts and correspondence. James also personally experimented with nitrous oxide, famously using it to mock Hegelian ideas in an endnote to “On Some Hegelisms” (1882). James scholars tend to treat this as a biographical curiosity: Gerald E. Myers calls it a “‘peripheral’ experiment” and James Campbell places nitrous oxide alongside a slew of other mind-altering substances with which James experimented. In this presentation, I argue instead that James’s use of nitrous oxide, especially as a method of reading, is central to his approach to interpretation more generally. Just as nitrous oxide allows users to experience new streams of consciousness, James encourages his audience to read creatively by pulling together otherwise disparate ideas. He models this in “A Pluralistic Mystic” with extended quotations that string together passages from discrete Blood texts with no signal stronger than ellipses. By reading this essay alongside the James family’s playfulness and “weirdness,” I suggest that nitrous oxide and other mind-altering substances reflect what can appear naturally in the best kind of reading: an expanded attention to diverse streams of thought coming creatively together.

Paper: “Aphoristic Science:
 Poetry, Empiricism, and Short Forms in Nineteenth-Century Ecology”

Abstract

My paper brings together two typically disparate features of the nineteenth century: the emergence of ecological science and the development of an open-ended aphoristic style. In contrast to the common English-language understanding of “aphorisms” as synonymous with pithy maxims, I trace an alternative tradition of expansive, open-ended aphorisms that emerged in German literature beginning in the late eighteenth century. This tradition originated with physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who kept Sudelbücher, or “waste-books,” full of suggestive notes and scientific aphorisms meant to inspire the reader to continue the experimental process. Scholars like J. P. Stern and Franz H. Mautner have identified the poetic nature of even the most scientific aphorisms, showing how aesthetic subjectivity expands the breadth of objective observation. Although research on the aphoristic tendencies of writers like Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt have been fruitful, scholars have yet overlooked the aphoristic (in this open-ended sense) writing of American ecologists like Henry David Thoreau and Susan Fenimore Cooper. I argue that these writers similarly approach nature from this poetic-scientific perspective which manifests in their writing as ambiguous, experimental aphorisms that disrupt systematic taxonomy in favor of continuous interpretation and rereading. By examining Thoreau’s Journal and Cooper’s Rural Hours, I illustrate how the aphorism and literary language generally was central to the emerging scientific discourse of nineteenth-century ecology. Recovering this aphoristic approach, I claim, disrupts the rigid disciplinarity of the sciences while also suggesting a more robust scientific-literary practice in our time of climate crisis and general science skepticism.

Paper: “Endlessly Rereading Thoreau’s Journalistic Fragments”

(part of my organized panel “Endlessness: Open-ended Interpretation and the Affordances of Short Forms”)

Abstract

My paper examines the nineteenth-century journal as an inherently endless form. Although journal writing necessarily ends with an author’s death, the practice of daily journal-keeping implies continuation and a lack of conclusiveness. Moreover, the archival impulse alongside the scholarly desire to collect and edit authoritative editions enables continuous reading, interpretation, and discovery from the original journal manuscript. In this paper, I take Henry David Thoreau’s Journal as exemplary of this open-ended style of writing, which not only provided Thoreau with an endless fountain of creative inspiration, but also continues to supply present-day ecologists with data and environmental insight. Other short diaristic forms in the nineteenth century, like the commonplace book or daybook, tend to close off maxims or events into their brief entries. Thoreau’s Journal, by contrast, functions centrifugally, using quotations or observations as springboards for new streams of thought or new styles of writing. In particular, I suggest that Thoreau’s observations and descriptions of natural phenomena create a space for readers to branch off and discover new, creative insight within their own ecological context. I call this philosophical and experimental approach Thoreau’s “radicle empiricism,” which takes the directional and networking apparatus of plant root systems as a model. Scholars like Branka Arsić and Kristin Case have recently attended to Thoreau’s vegetal thinking and writing, and Laura Dassow Walls specifically traces the samarae, or “winged seeds,” in the Journal. However, I argue that a rooted model better displays Thoreau’s empirical process, where taproots (“radicles”) and offshoots of thinking coexist as a nonhierarchical approach to science. The fragmented, open-ended style of the Journal further encourages readers to continue tracing their own offshoots, leading to an endless drive toward new, creative discovery.

Paper: “Feeling Thoreau’s Radicle Empiricism”

Abstract

My paper examines Henry David Thoreau’s writing about trees in his Journal as a form of “radicle empiricism.” A pun on William James’s philosophy of “radical empiricism,” where every relation felt as “real” is included in the system, radicle empiricism instead centers on the feeling of plant roots (“radicle” meaning “taproot”). By focusing on Thoreau’s Journal, I show how he traces the experience of plant communities through his iterative process of writing. Attending to his language about and around trees (in Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota), I argue, reveals his acute sense of affective relation with his ecological environment. Thoreau’s writing becomes a complex web of what Patrícia Vieira calls “phytographia,” where both humans and plants participate in the process of writing. Thoreau’s Journal extends a web of interspersed “feeling”: the plants feel and explore the world around them, and Thoreau feels and engages with the plants around him. While scholars like Kristen Case have compellingly illustrated Thoreau’s scientific Kalendar project and his later study on forest succession, I suggest that the seeds of these projects began in earlier metaphors and sketches throughout the Journal. Reading the entries as forms of “veer ecology”—drawing on Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert’s edited collection of that name—I argue that Thoreau uses the short, aphoristic style of the journal entry to explore the affective content of environmental themes. Focusing on plant growth and building on pea root research by Monica Gagliano, I claim that Thoreau’s language and penchant toward illustrations embodies a type of “radicle” empiricism that depends on an affective experience with one’s environment. Ultimately, I argue that Thoreau’s writing about plants in his Journal reveals a way forward in our current ecological moment; he reveals the importance of engaging, affective encounters with the environment that extend beyond the personal toward creative “radicle” inquiry.