Drawing on Agamben’s lecture on “the contemporary,” this essay argues that the transcendentalists were truly contemporary precisely because their leading magazine, the Dial, seemed ill timed and their interventions in the public debate appeared irrelevant. Highlighting the uncanny effects of periodical publishing and periodical reading, I suggest that the Dial performs the transcendentalists’ untimely contemporaneousness, while enacting their project of giving voice to the spirit of the time.
