QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS FOR RALPH WALDO EMERSON’S “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR”

QUESTIONS FOR A SECOND READING

1. Emerson’s prose is difficult to read and the difficulty is not simply the difficulty of long sentences or big words. Emerson’s writing is difficult because it is unusual. His sentences and paragraphs don’t do what we are trained to think sentences and paragraphs are supposed to do. As readers, we are not trained to read him.

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ASSIGNMENTS FOR WRITING

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3. There is no question but that Emerson’s text is difficult to read, and the difficulty is not simply a matter of big or unusual words. The text just doesn’t do what we expect it to do. Some of its elusiveness can be attributed to the time during which it was written — expectations were different then — but this should not keep you from making the most of your own responses as a reader. For one thing, it’s not completely true; not everyone in the 1830s wrote like Emerson. For another, it assumes that a non-specialist cannot or should not read works from the past. One way of imagining your connection to the 1830s is to imagine that your encounter with this text is somehow typical — that you, too, are Emerson’s contemporary.

Take a section of the essay that you find characteristically difficult. (Section II is an interesting one to work with.) Reread it, paying close attention to the experience of reading. Where are you surprised? Where are you confused? How might this be part of a strategy, part of Emerson’s design? What is Emerson doing? What is he asking you to do? This should be an exercise in close reading. You want to pay attention to how paragraph leads to paragraph, sentence leads to sentence; to notice the ways examples or statements are offered and taken away.

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4. It’s obvious that Emerson’s essay is addressed to men. A text such as this can be an occasion for a close reading of the ways in which an author creates or imagines gender — and all of the social characteristics associated with it, especially what an author considers to be “natural” to men and women. It’s possible to think of an author’s claims for something as being “natural,” in other words, as a device that both masks and reveals social attributes that could be said to be constructed through culture. The word “natural,” or an author’s implications that some things are “natural” to men or women, can become, then, a site for a close study of the beliefs and values an author might be assuming about men and women or about manliness and womanliness.

This assignment has two parts. The first invites you to work with Emerson’s “The American Scholar” to study how he figures what is “natural” for men, and, therefore, by implication what might be (or might not be) natural for women. The second part asks you to situate this understanding of Emerson’s construction of men and manliness — and his indirect construction of women and womanliness — in a larger context defined by something else he has written.

For the first part of this assignment, then, pick two or three passages from Emerson’s “The American Scholar” where you understand him to be writing about what he takes to be “natural” to men or manliness. Write an essay in which you discuss the assumptions about men and women he reveals in these passages. What, too, do the passages mask or hide about his assumptions about women?

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MAKING CONNECTIONS

1. In each of the three sections of “The American Scholar,” Emerson charts out influences on the mind and spirit of the scholar. In section I, for example, he says, “the first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. . . . The scholar must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle.” “The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar,” he says in section II, “is the mind of the Past, — in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed.” And in the third section Emerson argues against the image of the scholar as “a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any handiwork or public labor” in favor of the scholar as a “man of action” in the world.

Several other authors in this anthology also show their concern for the education of young Americans, although they are writing from different points in history with different investments in the classroom as a site of learning, and they are writing about a different set of students from the white elite who attended Harvard in 1837. For example, you could turn to any of the following: Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (p. 24 of the print book); Joshua Foer, “The End of Remembering” (p. 159 of the print book); Richard Miller, “The Dark Night of the Soul”; Walker Percy, “The Loss of the Creature” (p. 297 of the print book); Richard Rodriguez, “The Achievement of Desire” (p. 336 of the print book); Kathryn Schulz, “Evidence” (p. 360 of the print book); or David Foster Wallace, “Authority and American Usage.” (p. 386 of the print book)

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