Three Heretics

The paper considers the place of Ralph Waldo Emerson's incendiary "Divinity School Address" (1838) in the larger intellectual history of philosophical approaches to the problem miracles. The paper further considers the way a rhetoric of heresy functions in Emerson's style, and the way the strongly denunciatory reaction to the talk led Emerson to intensify his literary non-conformism. The more overarching suggestion is that experimental styles of free-thinking and free-speaking are crucial to the transition from pre-modern Ecclesiastical authority to the giving of reasons characteristic of Enlightenment reasoning, and that Emerson takes his own (however idiosyncratic) place in this intellectual history.

Paul Grimstad is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature at New York Universityin 2007 and his B.A. in English Literature in UW-Madison in 1996. His book project, Experience and Experimental Writing from Emerson to William James, explores the links between philosophies of experience and literary innovation in Emerson, Poe, Melville, Charles Peirce, William and Henry James, Henri Bergson and John Dewey. The further aim of the study is to show how literary experimentation for these figures often arose from non-American encounters, and as such complicates the project of establishing an original American literature in the nineteenth-century.

Co-sponsored by the Kelly Writers House, the Graduate Group in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly.