British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

Abstract
In “The American Scholar,” Emerson warns against a practice of reading that he aligns with the “bookworm.” Instead, he demands a practice that he terms “creative reading”: “When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.” In my paper, I explore the value of this practice for teaching the humanities to my Turkish undergraduates, most of whom are engineering majors. While many of my colleagues have abandoned at-home writing assignments due to fears of artificial intelligence use, I continue to assign a semester-long reading journal. This journal is an opportunity to read the course texts creatively, in the Emersonian sense, thus allowing students to translate (linguistically or culturally) a piece of literature into their own lives. I often introduce this assignment with both Emerson’s address and also an example from Thoreau’s Journal where he takes a rather dull description of plant physiology from a textbook and transforms it into an analogy for human thought. With this sample in hand, students read more actively, searching for a suggestive quotation upon which they may ruminate, attempting to, as Thoreau claims, create a “new field for thinking.” As I share my experiences with this assignment over the past two years, I argue that this Emersonian model of creative reading serves not only to alleviate some of the concerns with generative AI in the classroom, but it also encourages a more democratic classroom. Rather than lecturing on “correct interpretations,” as my students are expecting, this assignment incentivizes them to explore new ways of imaging the text. Such a democratic pedagogy, I suggest, transforms “The ‘American’ Scholar” into a more transnational call to intellectual arms that is well fit for (at least) the Turkish university setting.