Thinking America: Public Intellectuals and the Framing of National Identity, 1837-1909

This project asks what it means to be a public intellectual in nineteenth and early twentieth century American literary and political culture. How do we give public expression to thought, and how are we to understand the sometimes occluded relationship between thought and action? Through an examination of six key writers of the period- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Henry Adams and William James, the study argues that to perform the role of the intellectual is to inhabit a fundamentally paradoxical position.
On the one hand, intellectuals are required to act in a manner informed by thought, so as to justify their elevated status within the public culture; on the other, there is an expectation that intellectuals should remain untarnished by action, as if thought cannot retain its moral credibility once enacted. '
'Thinking America' sets out to explore this ambivalent narrative in the context of a rapidly evolving public culture, one in which questions were pressing about where intellectual work should best be located, and what kind of language might best embody it. The decline of a shared Christian discourse, slavery's violent fracturing of the public sphere, the development of both a market economy and a university culture, and the effect of mass immigration and overseas imperialism on national self-definition, all provide challenges to the form and function of intellectual activity in the period.

Emerson is central to this book: his most assertive instances of personal and national autonomy - those moments that seem to confirm him as the prophet of American exceptionalism- provide a powerful model of intellectual independence that all of my chosen writers are unable to adopt wholesale (even Emerson himself). Bruce Robbins and Edward Said have argued that such independence needs instead to be harnessed to a non-national.
Cosmopolitan vantage point for it to have any effectiveness. However, rather than discarding the nation-state as an organising force for intellectual work, my study asks to what extent the presence of transatlantic and transnational frameworks serves to complicate the ways in which the United States is thought. In a nineteenth century culture of increased mobility and diversity, is it still possible to retain a belief in the cherished Enlightenment ideal of a coherent public sphere?

There are two main research contexts to which my study contributes. The first is the history of the intellectual brought into being as a category and character of moral, epistemic and political dispute. I examine the competing models of affiliation and independence that have proliferated in recent years (looking especially at those of Russell Jacoby, Zygmunt Bauman and Edward Said) to think through the locations and possibilities of intellectual work in the period under discussion.
The second major research context is derived from re beyond the parameters of autonomous national identity, are beginning to rethink the work of Americanisms such as Paul Giles and John Carlos Kowe, who, in reading American literature the discipline in cosmopolitan, transnational terms. My book builds on this approach to explore how the work of narrating national identity in the period is informed by structures of comparative analysis. If the intellectual is best placed to inhabit a cosmopolitan vantage point, what kind of relationship does s/he have to the nation-state?