The offices of Kairos: Emerson's rhetoric of transcendence and a nascent American literatureShow full item record
Title | The offices of Kairos: Emerson's rhetoric of transcendence and a nascent American literature |
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Author | Thompson, Roger Charles |
Date | 1999 |
Genre | Dissertation |
Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
Abstract | Through integrating rhetorical and literary studies, this dissertation argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson's theories of language rely on a theoretical kairos. Kairos has traditionally meant ¿right timing and due measure¿ in rhetorical studies, but in literary and theological studies it has meant, broadly, a providential moment when the eternal breaks into the temporal. When the two perspectives are integrated, kairos becomes a valuable heuristic for explaining nineteenth-century literary and rhetorical texts, many of which often self-consciously appeal to divine timing and moral propriety. For Emerson, America was the kairos , the nation, the time, and the place for divine intervention, and his writings repeatedly invoke the idea of the American kairos in order to initiate social change. For example, Emerson argues against rationalistic discourse and secularized literacy because for him, they separated America from its divine destiny. He offers, therefore, a new rhetoric based in the power of imaginative discourse to actualize divinity on earth. Emerson's rhetoric, therefore, is kairotic in that it attempts to make temporal the eternal in a special moment of insight. Emerson's new rhetoric of kairos influences a wide variety of literary and rhetorical texts in nineteenth-century America. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin invokes the idea of kairos , a moment for spiritual change, in order to show that slavery had broken moral law and America had fallen from its mission of spiritual progress, and Herman Melville, in ¿Benito Cereno,¿ participates in an Emersonian critique of rationalistic discourse's power to enslave the soul. These works embody the kairotic rhetoric that Emerson envisioned, and they participate in a cultural reform that sought to re-establish America as a providential nation. |
Link | https://repository.tcu.edu/handle/116099117/32717 |
Department | English |
Advisor | Enos, Richard Leo Erisman, Fred |
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Doctoral Dissertations [1526]
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