Abstract

Reviewed by: A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind by Sean Ross Meehan Nathan Crick Sean Ross Meehan, A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN: 9781640140233 Ralph Waldo Emerson is not a hero of metaphor but a metonymic poet. This is the central, provocative, and novel insight offered by Sean [End Page 468] Ross Meehan. One might miss this contribution looking only at the title or the outline of the book. A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind seems to promise a broad treatment of Emerson’s late writings, while the tripartite structure of the book describes three purposes: 1) a reconsideration of Emerson’s interest in rhetoric as “a broader, organizing principle of mind,” 2) a reconsideration of his engagement “with the ideas and pedagogy of the classical liberal arts college and curriculum,” and 3) a reconsideration of “Emerson’s influence on other writers and thinkers in the same period of transformation” (5). Meehan’s book delivers on these promises. We find extended treatments of Emerson’s influence on William James, Walt Whitman, and W. E. B. Dubois, as well as a case study in his differences with the reform agenda of Harvard president Charles W. Elliott as he redesigned the University in the model of disciplinary specialization. Each of these chapters correct what Meehan sees as an injustice done to Emerson, who “as a theorist of rhetoric’s older pedagogy of relation, is marginalized in the isolated departments of the university” (66). Through his book, Meehan seeks to enshrine Emerson as one of the founding figures of the American liberal arts tradition in order to make real a vision of the well-rounded student with training in rhetorical deliberation and eloquence. He pursues this goal with passion and thoroughness. It is his treatment of Emerson’s conception of metonymy, though, that I believe makes this book unique and groundbreaking. Yet Meehan does not make this discovery easy on the reader. The book promises a study of the “rhetoric of mind,” but it addresses the meaning of this phrase on one page with these two sentences: “There is a ‘rhetoric of mind’—so Emerson describes what he also called a ‘philosophy of mind’ in his essay ‘Intellect’—that serves as an organizing principle of this writer’s style of fluid thinking . . . This ‘rhetoric of mind’ informs and organizes the poetics that transgresses the conventional definitions of philosophic logic” (22). The actual substance of this “rhetoric of mind” remains elusive, but the following paragraph gives a clue: “Emerson argues that metonymy, the rhetorical figure of association by way of context and contiguity, provides the analogical foundation and purpose for all rhetoric, indeed for all writing and thinking” (22). For Meehan, metonymy “is not just a particular figure of speech or even a figure of thought, but a name for the very figuring of thought” (22). These assertions are bold enough to arouse interest but ambiguous enough to keep one reading. It takes Meehan almost half of the book to return to this subject in earnest. Although interim treatments of James and Whitman and Elliott are historically and philosophically relevant and insightful, their purpose is less to describe this metonymic rhetoric of mind and more to establish relationships of influence and to define ethical and pedagogical principles. By the time we reach Whitman in the third chapter, metonymy reappears in full. For Meehan as for Emerson, metonymy represents more than just a trope; even the phrase a “rhetoric of mind does not really do it justice. Metonymy has almost an existential connotation. For instance, when interpreting a passage in which Emerson discusses the relationship between [End Page 469] nature, the parts of the body, memory, and mind, Meehan writes: “Emerson uses ‘this metonomy’ in the passage to illustrate the way that thought, as an active part of nature, moves through the condensations (nebulae becoming blood) and contingencies of the mind’s relation to matter in the various forms of becoming in which it shares . . . The world is a rock, loam, chyle; it is body, blood, mind, action; it is...