{"product_id":"miles-of-stare-michelle-kohler-9780817318352","title":"Miles of Stare: Transcendentalism and the Problem of Literary Vision in Nineteenth-Century America","description":"\u003ci\u003eMiles of Stare\u003c\/i\u003e explores the problem of nineteenth-century American literary vision: the strange conflation of visible reality and poetic language that emerges repeatedly in the metaphors and literary creations of American transcendentalists. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe strangeness of nineteenth-century poetic vision is exemplified most famously by Emerson's transparent eyeball. That disembodied, omniscient seer is able to shed its body and transcend sight paradoxically in order to see--not to create--poetic language \"manifest\" on the American landscape. In \u003ci\u003eMiles of Stare\u003c\/i\u003e, Michelle Kohler explores the question of why, given American transcendentalism's anti-empiricism, the movement's central trope becomes an eye purged of imagination. And why, furthermore, she asks, despite its insistent empiricism, is this notorious eye also so decidedly not an eye? What are the ethics of casting a boldly equivocal metaphor as the source of a national literature amidst a national landscape fraught with slavery, genocide, poverty, and war? \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eMiles of Stare\u003c\/i\u003e explores these questions first by tracing the historical emergence of the metaphor of poetic vision as the transcendentalists assimilated European precedents and wrestled with America's troubling rhetoric of manifest destiny and national identity. These questions are central to the work of many nineteenth-century authors writing in the wake of transcendentalism, and Kohler offers examples from the writings of Douglass, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Howells, and Jewett that form a cascade of new visual metaphors that address the irreconcilable contradictions within the transcendentalist metaphor and pursue their own efforts to produce an American literature. Douglass's doomed witness to slavery, Hawthorne's reluctantly omniscient narrator, and Dickinson's empty \"miles of Stare\" variously skewer the authority of Emerson's all-seeing poetic eyeball while attributing new authority to the limitations that mark their own literary gazes. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eTracing this metaphorical conflict across genres from the 1830s through the 1880s, Miles of Stare illuminates the divergent, contentious fates of American literary vision as nineteenth-century writers wrestle with the commanding conflation of vision and language that lies at the center of American transcendentalism--and at the core of American national identity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Michelle Kohler\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0817318356\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780817318352\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University Alabama Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 06\/25\/2014\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 240\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.10lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.10h x 6.00w x 1.10d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eReview Citation(s): \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eChoice\u003c\/i\u003e 03\/01\/2015 pg. 1145","brand":"Michelle Kohler","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":48086956966143,"sku":"9780817318352","price":54.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_be36b5dd-3420-4d12-becc-4042700065f8.jpg?v=1769097473","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/miles-of-stare-michelle-kohler-9780817318352","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}