The Dial, Vol. 2, No. 1
This issue of The Dial ranges between multiple areas of focus including Emerson’s poetry of and concerning aging; female editorship, intellectual labor, and anguish; and Transcendentalist
perspectives on our current, fraught moment in higher ed.
ARTICLES
Alice de Galzain examines the editorships of Margaret Fuller and Catherine Dall, exploring each Transcendentalist woman’s experience of precarity and pain as well as its implications for female intellectuals today;
Peter Balaam mulls Emerson’s Terminus as an articulation of aging, boundary, and resignation, interpreting its Stoic tone as both personal reckoning and philosophical culmination of Emerson’s career.
FORUM ON THE TIMES: HIGHER ED NOW
This issue’s forum section gathers five statements connecting vicissitudes of nineteenth-century Transcendentalism with current crises in U. S. higher ed emergent since the inauguration of the second Trump presidency.
Christopher Hanlon introduces the forum by way of the notion of “anticipatory obedience,” revisiting Emerson’s Divinity School Address and the controversy surrounding it that resulted in Emerson’s banishment from Harvard for over 25 years;
Stephanie Foote weaves her reading of “The American Scholar” with an account of her experience as a former faculty member at West Virginia University, where the effort to “transform” the institution resulted in the dissolution of 25 programs including twelve degree programs in the humanities;
Samuel Cohen takes a second look at Emerson’s purported literary nationalism in order to examine the xenophobic bases of MAGA’s move on colleges and universities;
Jennifer Greiman brings Thoreauvian civil disobedience into the context of student activism over Gaza in order to challenge us to “think comparatively and transhistorically” — and to be “relentlessly presentist”—in order to check institutional overreach in response to such organizing;
Christopher Newfield revisits the interests that energized his 1991 monograph The Emerson Effect in order to assess the corporatizing structures in higher ed. that disempower faculty and students, and to suggest alternative possibilities.
The Dial, Vol. 1, No. 1
About the Inaugural Issue
This inaugural issue of The Dial divides attention between two critical discussions that have been absorbing for those who are concerned with and invested in the interconnections between justice and sustainability.
In the first set of essays on Transcendentalism and climate:
John Levi Barnard discusses the challenge of climate change through the lens of Thoreau’s critique of the railroad in Walden;
Jeffrey Insko examines cultural fantasies surrounding solar energy, drawing on Emerson’s concept of “Transcendental solarity”;
Jamie L. Jones explores Thoreau’s observations about the sea in Cape Cod to illuminate the complexities of global capitalism and its relationship to the environment through her own experiences observing ship traffic in the Strait of Gibraltar;
Russ Castronovo explores potential connections between the work of Octavia Butler and Henry David Thoreau, focusing on shared concerns about technology, power, and social responsibility;
Richard B. Primack and Abraham J. Miller-Rushing detail their work with the portions of Thoreau’s journals that have provided an extensive dataset to researchers searching for concrete evidence of human-induced climate change and its effects on the environment.
After this grouping of essays focused on Transcendentalism and the environment, we are pleased to offer three statements making up a forum around the subjects of public memory, memorialization, and Concord, in which:
Elise Lemire interrogates the idealized image of Daniel Chester French’s Minute Man statue, revealing the monument’s historical inaccuracies and its exclusion of enslaved people and Black patriots who fought in the American Revolution;
Kristen Treen explores the long-standing omission of George Washington Dugan, a Black soldier from Concord who fought in the Civil War, from the town’s Soldiers’ Monument;
Maria Madison recovers the story of Ellen Garrison Jackson, a Black Concordian who challenged segregation in the post-Civil War era.