Congratulations to Professor Lloyd Pratt who has been awarded a three-year Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship to complete a book project titled ‘Other People’s Emersons.’
Across the twentieth century, a long list of individual lay readers from around the world reconstructed Ralph Waldo Emerson’s works, making America’s most significant nineteenth-century intellectual into its most conspicuously reinterpreted one. They crafted newspaper and pamphlet compilations of Emerson quotations describing ‘how to live’ extracted piecemeal from his dense literary-philosophical essays. They conceived stage and screen adaptations, musical compositions, popular lectures, and curious small-run editions of his pivotal writings. They were people of colour and white people, women and men. They undertook these rewritings of Emerson in Arkansas and Edinburgh, Poland and Paris, Chicago and Ghana. Their versions of Emerson reveal the potency and the latent peril of intensely self-interested interpretation.
The book’s aim is to rework our sense of Emerson’s key arguments by practising a form of scholarship that respects what the philosopher Jacques Rancière has called ‘the equality of intelligences’ and by acknowledging insight wherever it originates. As Emerson wrote, ‘There is creative reading as well as creative writing’. ‘Other People’s Emersons’ will engage with the creative reading that saw these versions of Emerson emerge alongside and in mute dialogue with the interpretations taking shape in scholarly conversation. Often right and sometimes intriguingly wrong, this creative reading warrants a sustained rethinking of the content and character of Emersonianism as we know it.
