Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson

This book establishes surprise as a key Emersonian affect, and demonstrates its significance for transatlantic modernism and the philosophy of pragmatism.

Kate Stanley (Author)

9781108426879, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 July 2018

254 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.5 kg

Kate Stanley's Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson is a dynamic form of intellectual history that, focusing on a poetics of surprise, threads together writers and thinkers from Emerson and William James to Nella Larsen and John Cage. The study lives up to its title by including clever, beautifully crafted readings that show how the practice works. The erudition is breathtaking: this will be an essential resource for scholars in literary studies and of great interest to philosophers of phenomenology. Practices of Surprise reflects a keen knowledge of American pragmatism and contributes to contemporary critical debate about the methods and ends of literary scholarship.' Jane F. Thrailkill, Bank of America Honors Distinguished Term Associate Professor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson locates a paradoxical question - how does one prepare to be surprised? - at the heart of several major modernist texts. Arguing that this paradox of perception gives rise to an American literary methodology, this book dramatically reframes how practices of reading and writing evolved among modernist authors after Emerson. Whereas Walter Benjamin defines modernity as a 'series of shocks' inflicted from without, Emerson offers a countervailing optic that regards life as a 'series of surprises' unfolding from within. While Benjaminian shock elicits intimidation and defensiveness, Emersonian surprise fosters states of responsiveness and spontaneity whereby unexpected encounters become generative rather than enervating. As a study of how such states of responsiveness were cultivated by a post-Emerson tradition of writers and thinkers, this project displaces longstanding models of modernist perception defined by shock's passive duress, and proposes alternate models of reception that proceed from the active practice of surprise.

Introduction: through Emerson's eye
1. Proust's perceptual training
2. Henry James's syntax of surprise
3. Nella Larsen's novel weather
4. Gertrude Stein's grammars of attention
Coda: surprised by silence (listening with Cage).

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]