The likeness of things unlike : a poetics of incommensurability / Sharon Cameron.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cameron, Sharon, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

American literature.

Literature--Philosophy.

Literature.

Literature--Aesthetics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Poetics of incommensurability

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Summary:

"A study of the incommensurable, often discordant elements that define major works of American literature. In Sharon Cameron’s essays, a magnetic constellation gathers works of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Cather, and Stevens—each manifesting in its own terms “the likeness of things unlike”—to form a loose commonality in a strain of American writing in which incommensurable elements can’t be integrated and can’t be separated. The Likeness of Things Unlike is concerned with discordant elements of an aesthetic work and argues that these elements refigure the aesthetic wholes whose integrity they apparently violate. These intertwined, subversive elements are challenges to literary systems and are essentially philosophical in their rethinking of categories, and thus go beyond the aesthetic particulars that exemplify them. Cameron is known for rigorously and brilliantly connecting artistic achievement to radical ways of thinking. Georg Lukcás describes the essayist as one who “adapts himself to the essay’s ‘smallness’ of form—the eternal smallness of the most profound work of the intellect in [the] face of life.” With The Likeness of Things Unlike Cameron powerfully demonstrates Lukács’s remarkable insight."--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction

Beginning to be: Emerson's paratactic images

Whitman's translations

Done with the compass, done with the chart: off-the-map scenes in Dickinson's poems

Something like Nebraska and something like Virginia: Cather's incommensurables

Wallace Stevens's entangled objects.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource, publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226837062

0226837068

OCLC:

1492770068