Abstract

Though Fuller does not rely on Harold Bloom’s notion of Emerson as “our ghostly father” (though this is cited early on), his focus on these four critics delves richly and rewardingly into the cultural, biographical, and psychological contexts in which each man agonizes with Emerson’s example. Fuller speculates that Bercovitch’s critical project, like Matthiessen’s before him, is partly motivated by an absent father and “is buried in his understanding that American writers always struggle to ‘complete their fathers’” (128). Fuller gathers these details of psychological and cultural struggle with insight and eloquence, rendering more compelling the larger picture of Emerson’s struggle to become an American scholar, and the struggle, thereupon, shared by critics who have followed him. In his concluding chapter, Fuller raises the question of Emerson’s haunting presence in criticism today. Though he suggests that Emerson’s position in the current climate of multicultural and post-national studies “has never been more vehemently contested” (149), I would also agree with his conclusion that we will continue to remain haunted by Emerson to the extent that his work challenges us “to better think and act” (158). This point is important to the premise and achievement of this study: Emersonian hauntings are not just what some critics in the past have failed to do with Emerson; they are (to echo Cavell) part of the very conditions for our reading of Emerson and (if we read him rightly) for American literature. My one criticism of Emerson’s Ghosts is that Fuller does not give enough attention to such implications as evident in the following: “Of course, not all of Emerson’s critics have been so powerfully haunted by the example of ‘The American Scholar’” (148). This quick statement in the final chapter is followed by a brief discussion of Cavell’s work in philosophy, and followed up only by a lengthy footnote that suggests additional examples in the work of Richard Poirier and Eduardo Cadava. Fuller distinguishes himself from such critics in asserting that they are not “overly concerned” with his ur-text, “The American Scholar” (187). That may be, but how these critics manage to take up Emerson and remain creatively haunted by his work, in ways that Fuller wants us all to be haunted by Emerson, is a matter that should have made its way into his text, presumably his introduction. The ghostliness of this footnote aside, Fuller has crafted a work that will enlighten American scholars in its readings and cheer us in its own fine example of what Emerson means for scholarship, yesterday and today.