Chapter that looks at metonymy and metaphor (chapter 11). Apply ideas of meme theory to Emerson’s natural history of intellect?

Who has looked into Emerson and meme?

William James–an anticipation of the link between biological and social evolution. [get to Emerson and meme through James?]

Emerson and McLuhan: his ‘extensions of man’ from Emerson’s “Works and Days”

book on MM {McLuhan in Space} that lists various possible sources for his ‘extension’ (including RWE–quoted by MM in Take Today, p. 86).

Emerson’s Works and Days

Emerson (natural history of intellect) cited in The Shallows–doesn’t mention that ‘extension’ of technology comes from R

Towards an Ecology of Understanding (article on McLuhan linking semiotics with medium theory)

McLuhan Misunderstood (overview article by a former collaborator)

Whitehead, process (cited in Medium is the Massage): is this the link between Emerson and electronic processes?

Recent Publications

Education After an Earthquake

“Education after an Earthquake: Emerson’s Lessons in Panic and Pedagogy.” Pedagogy 11.2  (Spring 2011).

Nature’s Stomach

“’Nature’s Stomach’: Emerson, Whitman, and the Poetics of Metonymy.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (Winter 2011).

You Are the Book’s Book

“‘You are the Book’s Book’: Robert Richardson’s Emersonian Workshop.” Pedagogy 11.1 (Winter 2010).

Photography.Transcendentalism

“Photography.” In The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism. Ed. Myerson, Petrulionis, Walls (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman

(University of Missouri Press, 2008).

“This deeply thoughtful and widely-informed meditation on the place of photography in the work of four major American writers—Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman—is a book not just to read but to think with. His writers stand at no great distance from our own digital, hypermediated age, but at its dawn, reaching to us for their completion. This book will engage and enlighten anyone interested in the intertwining of literature, science, and technology.”—Laura Dassow Walls, author of Emerson’s Life in Science

“Sean Ross Meehan has filled a substantial gap in the study of photography and literature, visual culture in nineteenth-century America, media studies, and mid-nineteenth-century American literature and autobiography. His focus on the pivotal American authors of the incipient photographic age is a topic that has gone begging for scholarly coverage. Meehan has sharply illuminated an important aspect of American thought and culture at the onset of the technological era.”—Linda Haverty Rugg, author of Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography

“Mediating American Autobiography offers new insights into nineteenth-century autobiographical acts by exploring how photography influenced conceptions of visual and verbal representation. I left the book with a deeper understanding of how key writers understood the new technology of photography, but, more important, how this new medium shaped and/or provided a vehicle for their self-understanding and self-presentation.”
—Bruce Mills, author of Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance

 

The emergence of photography in the mid-nineteenth century transformed ideas about how the self and nature could be pictured. Although the autobiographical potential of photography seems self-evident today, Sean Meehan takes us back to the birth of the medium when some of America’s preeminent authors began to think about photography’s implications for the representation of identity and the nature of autobiographical writing.

 

Both photography and autobiography involve a tension between disclosing and concealing their means of production: a chemical process for one, the writing process for the other. Meehan examines how four major authors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman—were well aware of this tension and explored it in their work. By examining the implications of early photography in their writings, he shows how each engaged the new visual medium, how photography mediated their conceptions of self-representation, and how their appropriation of photographic thinking created a new kind of autobiography.

 

Examining the metonymic nature of photography, Meehan explores how the new medium influenced conceptions of visual and verbal representation. He intertwines these four writers’ reflections on photography—in Emerson’s Representative Men, Thoreau’s journals, Douglass’s narratives of slavery, and Whitman’s Specimen Days—with theories of photography as expounded by its inventors and observers, from Louis Daguerre and William Talbot in Europe to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Marcus Root in America.

 

As the first book to focus on the emergence of this new visual medium during the American Renaissance, Mediating American Autobiography shows us what photography means for American literature in general and for the genre most closely linked to it in particular. Because the engagement of these writers with photography has been neglected in previous scholarship, Meehan’s work provocatively bridges the study of two media and illuminates an important aspect of American thought and culture at the dawn of the technological era.

About the Author

Sean Ross Meehan teaches English at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.

Work in Progress

The primary focus of my current research and writing centers around Emerson and his significant, yet critically neglected, engagement with the idea and the practice of education.  Many educators, indeed, some Emerson scholars, would be surprised to learn, for example, that Harvard president Charles William Eliot credited Emerson as a prominent influence in American education and in Eliot’s own reform of the Harvard curriculum and higher education largely still with us today. There is a need to learn more about Emerson and his educational contexts, in this regard; there is also an opportunity to learn what Emerson communicates for education today. My book-length project, Emerson’s School, explores Emerson’s engagement with pedagogical ideas and practices as a teacher (his earliest profession), scholar, and writer.  I give emphasis to the ways Emerson, particularly throughout the unfinished later project he called a “natural history of intellect,” associates the dynamics of learning with the rhetorical concept of metonymy, an important figure named in this later work that has been largely neglected in Emerson criticism. I argue that a better grasp of Emerson’s metonymy of learning enables us to rethink and re-contextualize some of the conventional lines of influence regarding Emerson’s “teachings”: in particular, Thoreau and Whitman, among his contemporaries, and John Dewey and some recent exponents of digital learning, among his descendants.

Several pieces of this project have been published: “Living Learning: Lessons from Emerson’s School” (Emerson Society Papers), two pieces in Pedagogy (“’You are the Book’s Book’: Robert Richardson’s Emersonian Workshop” and “Education after an Earthquake: Emerson’s Lessons in Panic and Pedagogy”) and “‘Nature’s Stomach: Emerson, Whitman, and the Poetics of Digestion” (Walt Whitman Quarterly Review). I am currently preparing “Emerson, Thoreau, and the Nature of Metonymy” for submission as an article, developing upon the conference paper I gave at the Annual Gathering of the Thoreau Society in July 2011.  Looking farther ahead, a related project I have in mind is to edit a collection of essays on approaches to teaching Emerson; Emerson is noticeably absent from the MLA approaches to teaching series, an absence that several Emerson scholars I have talked with would like to redress.

The secondary focus of my research centers on my work teaching writing and directing a college writing program. I am currently revising for re-submission to College English an article that discusses my use of screenwriting structure as a model for thinking about the dramatic nature of academic argument and for organizing a thesis-governed essay in first-year writing courses. In addition to lessons from the dramatic structure of screenwriting, I draw upon Emerson’s understanding of “quotation and originality.” From this work I am developing a workshop that I will present to faculty teaching first-year writing courses. Looking ahead, my goal is to develop this research into a pedagogical text for writing teachers that explores film’s lessons for teaching composition. Though there is some work available on the subject of teaching film in composition or writing courses, the work largely centers on writing in response to film rather than writing as film.