Impersonality
Seven Essays
“Across this series of essays, Sharon Cameron performs a stunning literary-critical feat. Whether she is tracing a counterintuitive phenomenology (wherein experience cannot be individuated) or a counterintuitive ontology (wherein beings are beside the point), Cameron unfolds a fundamentally disorienting drama that reorients the way we think about thinking as such.”—Bill Brown, University of Chicago
“Sharon Cameron is a great scholar in the field of American literature. Her intellectual bravery, perceptual richness, and powers of interpretation are scarcely equaled. Impersonality is a fresh demonstration of her concern with the illusions that haunt our thinking about the self and the heroic efforts that some major writers have made to dispel them. This book is a triumph of searching inquiry.”—George Kateb, Princeton University
“This book is bold, brilliant, difficult, and exhilarating; it confirms Sharon Cameron as one of the most original thinkers among contemporary critics of American literature. There is no work like Impersonality in the critical literature, though in spirit one could find in figures such as Stanley Cavell or William Empson some similarity of interests. But as in her previous works, Cameron is in a class by herself in her attention to primary matters of consciousness and being.”—Eric Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction by Way of William Empson’s Buddha Faces
2. What Counts as Love: Jonathan Edwards’s True Virtue
3. Representing Grief: Emerson’s “Experience”
4. “The Way of Life by Abandonment”: Emerson’s Impersonal
5. The Practice of Attention: Simone Weil’s Performance of Impersonality
6. “The Sea’s Throat”: T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets
7. “Lines of Stones”: The Unpersonified Impersonal in Melville’s Billy Budd
Notes
Index
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature | General Criticism and Critical Theory
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