LOGOCENTRIC WORLD-MAKING: EMERSON, FAULKNER, AND BELLOW

YUP PARK, Purdue University

Abstract

As many critics have noted, the American literary tradition from at least Emerson's time to the present is characterized by a tendency to create America itself. This tendency connects a romantic desire for a new life of greater freedom and the power of language. The tendency became dominant among American writers who shared Coleridge's concept of the word as power. Underlying their agenda is the impulse to give to the self the freedom to impose order on chaos. Establishing order is essential to the creation and recovery of absent truth inasmuch as the literary artist's creative work thrives on and relies on the power of language in its permutation of presences and absences. The artistic performance through a heightened use of language is what I call logocentric world-making that identifies the principal affinity among Emerson, Faulkner, and Bellow. These three writers, however, distinguish themselves from each other in the way the logos is defined in their writings. Emerson creates a world of logos in which the vital mind with transcendental energy bridges the gap between matter and spirit through permutation and concentration according to the method of nature as it encompasses past, present, and future in its act of metamorphosis. Thus, Emerson's logos lives both within and without the text. For Faulkner, the logos is the narrative consciousness, a moving center which is imaginative in the text, thereby purely textualized with its project to create a synchronic version of the fragmented world. In Bellow's fiction the logos furnishes the self with the power of imaginative language that organizes a truer sense of reality in contrast to the degenerative versions of reality. Thus, in Bellow's world of logos, the imagination provides an alternative and vital consciousness within the context of culture. These definitions of logos operative in the writings of Emerson, Faulkner, and Bellow corroborate their devotion to logocentrism as the most viable and effective mode of writing for the realization of their desire to use language toward the end of world-making. Their works, extraordinary monuments in the logocentric tradition of American literature, mark these three writers as principals in that tradition.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

American literature

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