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UVM Theses and Dissertations

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Format:
Print
Author:
Berger, Jason
Dept./Program:
English
Year:
2004
Degree:
M.A.
Abstract:
This thesis provides a postnational reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Karl Marx's early writings on "alienation." Its premise is the claim made in the first chapter of Lawrence Buell's Emerson that Emerson and Marx have similar criticism of the negative effects of the division of labor, but a divergent sense of the "path to social betterment." This thesis explores how Buell's conception of the relationship between Emerson and Marx epitomizes the attempts of Americanist scholars to reconcile the traditions of American literary history with recent postnational perspectives. In addition, it questions if Buell's postnational reading of Emerson is able to overcome the delimiting nationalist scholarship that he, himself, criticizes. Using Buell's directive to reanalyze Emerson's original work outside of "oversimplified" nationalist narratives, this thesis seeks to both reconsider and extend Buell's postnational interpretation of Emerson's thought. The first chapter, entitled "You Can't Get There From Here," explores the twentieth-century nationalist Emersonian scholarship that informs Buell's comparison of Emerson and Marx. The second chapter, "Like Marx, but in a Wholly Different Way?," reexamines Buell's premise that Emerson and Marx share a similar critique of the negative effects of the division of labor, but in a "different way."
Using a textual analysis of the early work of both writers (spanning primarily 1836-1846 collectively), this chapter reveals that Emerson's conceptualization of man's "alienation" from self within the evolving system of capitalism is much more commensurate to Marx's than Buell or other twentieth century Americanists have acknowledged. The third chapter, titled "'Paths' to Social Betterment," interrogates Buell's and twentieth-century scholarship's tendency to separate Emerson and Marx based on their conceptions of how to overcome alienation. Through a close reading of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of1844 and Emerson's Nature, this chapter reconsiders the traditional paradigmatic binaries of idealism versus materialism and mass action versus reform of the individual that have been used to categorize and differentiate between Emerson and Marx's work. Through this analysis, this chapter places both writers on a continuum between such forms of thought and conceptions of social reform, within, ultimately, a shared historical milieu that Michael Lopez has referred to as "post-Idealism."