- New Arrivals
Fiction- Historical FictionCrime & ThrillersMysteryScience-FictionFantasyPoetryRomanceChildren’s BooksYoung Adult
- Biographies & MemoirsHistoryCurrent AffairsTech & ScienceBusinessSelf-DevelopmentTravelThe ArtsFood & WineReligion & SpiritualitySportsHumor
Children’s BooksListsBlogGift CardsMy ListsGames- About & Help
- About Tertulia
- Membership & Co-Ownership
- Shipping & Delivery
- Orders & Payments
- Contact Support
- Send App Feedback
- Follow us
- Download the app
The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Impersonality: Seven Essays
Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. Sharon Cameron ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and figures of international modernism-writers for whom personal identity is inconsequential and even imaginary. In essays on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, Cameron examines the impulse to hollow out the core of human distinctiveness, to construct a voice that is no one's voice, to fashion a character without meaningful attributes, a being that is virtually anonymous. "To consent to being anonymous," Weil wrote, "is to bear witness to the truth. But how is this compatible with social life and its labels?" Throughout these essays Cameron examines the friction, even violence, set in motion from such incompatibility-from a "truth" that has no social foundation. Impersonality investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, and even destroys the person as a social, political, or individual entity, of writing that engages with personal identity at the moment when its usual markers vanish or dissolve.
Book Details
- Publisher: University of Chicago Press
- Publish Date: Feb 15th, 2007
- Pages: 272
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.28in - 0.61in - 0.85lb
- EAN: 9780226091327
- Categories: • Essays• American - General• English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
About the Author
Cameron, Sharon: - Sharon Cameron is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English Emerita at Johns Hopkins University. Among her books are Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, Thinking in Henry James, Impersonality: Seven Essays, and The Bond of the Furthest Apart: Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and Kafka.
Praise for this book
"Sharon Cameron's seven essays in Impersonality explore identity, personhood, self-making, and much else, through the work of Melville, Weil, Empson and others. It's a rich and rewarding book that I'll be thinking about for some time."--David Hayden "The Lonely Crowd"