Recent Past Conferences

Paper: “‘The Senses Interfere Everywhere’: Caving with Emerson and Poe”

Abstract

In Underland (2019), Robert Macfarlane describes the paradox of underground spaces: “that darkness may be a medium of vision, and that descent may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation.” In my paper, I consider this paradox of underground vision by exploring how the cave functions as a philosophical image of distorted understanding in Emerson’s essay “Illusions” (1860) and Poe’s novel Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Unlike more adventure-driven cave settings—from spaces of refuge in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans to spaces of exploration in Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—Emerson’s and Poe’s pieces use caves as sites of epistemological obscurity. For Emerson, the “Star-Chamber” of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, where the ceiling glimmers with false stars and comets in the dark, suggests the disorientation of human thought more broadly: “The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of.” For Poe, the winding Antarctic caverns with their mysterious hieroglyphic markings invite exploration, but they only result in Pym’s abrupt disappearance. Even when Poe suggests translations of some of the hieroglyphics to the reader in the novel’s postscript, their interpretation remains obscure. Where Emerson’s essay cautions against the influence of mere illusion, Poe’s novel warns about the destructive appeal of ambiguity. Yet, both transform these epistemological dangers into creative possibility. Emerson encourages readers to observe nature more carefully, sifting through illusions to find the hard bottom of reality. Poe inspires readers to imagine the novel’s possible endings, resulting in multiple streams of potential meaning. Whether through Emerson’s emergence toward clarity or Poe’s descent into mystery, the cave serves as a space of creativity—for the writer as well as the receptive reader—in the face of epistemological uncertainty.

Paper: “Science and Small Forms: Franklin and the Early American Aphorism”

Given as part of the Society of Early Americanists roundtable “Slight Forms.”

Abstract

In The Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon defined aphorisms as “the pith and heart of sciences” since they eliminate extended descriptions and “recitals of examples.” It is not that these descriptions and examples are unnecessary, but rather that by removing them Bacon creates “a knowledge broken,” which by its very fragmentation “invite[s] men to inquire further.” The short form, in other words, intentionally targets the reader, inspiring an attentive reading that flowers into action, such as novel interpretation or innovative experimentation. For Bacon, the aphorism is thus the ideal scientific form because its brevity inspires ongoing empirical inquiry. In this paper, I analyze how this Baconian aphoristic ideal permeates early American short textual forms. This was an expansive “ecology of form” (to borrow Devin Griffiths’s phrase) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The recent collection The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art (2024), for instance, features genres like fragments, scraps, and lists that form unique cultural assemblages; however, science writing is notably absent. I turn to Benjamin Franklin, who wields the short form in Poor Richard’s Almanack (1733–1758), modeling his “moral Sentences” and “wise Sayings” on the maxims of the French moralists. In his Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751), Franklin seems not to deploy the Baconian aphorism, recording instead the very descriptions and examples that Bacon would seen expunged from science writing. Yet, with his final section of numbered “opinions and conjectures,” Franklin revises the short aphoristic form by detailing his lack of knowledge in certain areas, opening space for readers to continue the process of experimentation. While early American science writing may not be aphoristic in Bacon’s sense, I argue it maintains the focus on the reader, which becomes central to the poetic science of nineteenth-century American writers. 

Paper: “‘Science is very near us’: Dickinson and the Poetics of Science”

Given as part of the Margaret Fuller Society panel “Margaret Fuller and Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers Observing Nature, Engaging Science.”

Abstract

In a brief “writing note” from July 1884, Dickinson jotted down: “Science is very near us – I found a megatherium on my Strawberry.” The image is striking: the Megatherium americanum is, after all, an extinct giant ground-sloth—an elephant-sized creature bearing no obvious resemblance to strawberries. Yet, in Dickinson’s poetic imagination, the cultivated berry possesses some kinship to extinct Pleistocene-age mammals. This entanglement of the scientific and the poetic in Dickinson’s work has drawn increased scholarly attention recently. Renée L. Bergland, for instance, argues for a “re-enchantment” of science, challenging the idea that scientific progress must necessary disenchant the natural world. Juliana Chow similarly suggests that Dickinson revitalizes science by unsettling strict definitions through a process of “diminishment.” In both cases, Dickinson’s poetic language continues to enliven scientific inquiry by reimagining the very terms under scrutiny. The megatherium is not a species to merely categorize into a taxonomy; it is an entity that continues to interact with berries and beings in the present. In this paper, I trace Dickinson’s scientific thinking through her correspondence, using the newly published Letters of Emily Dickinson (2024). A quick reading suggests that Dickinson was skeptical of science: she calls science a “stranger,” and in a poem sent to Susan Gilbert Dickinson complains of the increasing prevalence of scientific terminology: “It’s very mean of Science / To go and interfere!” However, her well-documented scientific education and interests, indicated in part by her viewing of the megatherium skeleton in a “cabinet” of natural history at Amherst College. I ultimately compare her aphoristic comments on science throughout her letters and notes with the history of aphoristic science, from Francis Bacon’s aphorismoi to Charles Darwin’s notebooks. In one such notebook, Darwin suggested that “art precedes science— art is experience & observation.” I argue that Dickinson models precisely this science-preceding art, writing her own suggestive lines based on her own observations—of skeletons, of flowers, of animals—that then serve to inspire new scientific experiences in her receptive readers.

Paper: “Creative Reading as Translational Reading: Teaching with Emerson in Türkiye”

Given as part of my organized panel “Emerson Abroad: Translational Perspectives on ‘The American Scholar.’”

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.

Paper: “An Ecology in Letters: Plant-Thinking in Dickinson’s Correspondence”

Abstract

In an 1877 letter to Sarah Tuckerman, Emily Dickinson shares her “timid happiness” that, as she describes, “adds to some bright total.” Included in this total are Dickinson’s botanical companions: “The immortality of Flowers must enrich our own, and we certainly should resent a Redemption that excluded them.” This line, which suggests that Dickinson includes the nonhuman in her sense of immortality, is also unusual: in the vegetal world, flowers are among the fastest perishing entity. We can easily read this metaphorically—flowers live on in our memory even after the plant itself dies—and much recent scholarship by Christine Gerhardt and Mary Kuhn has usefully revealed the layers of botanical thinking in Dickinson’s writing. However, I instead read this line in light of the morphology of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790), Goethe finds the Urpflanze in the form of the leaf: every piece of a plant, including its flower, is merely a metamorphosed leaf. For Goethe, vegetal life thus reveals the immortality of leaves. While Dickinson instead prioritizes the flower, I argue that her vision of plant life similarly conceives of immortality in this way: botanical forms metamorphosing over time, suggesting in the plant a feature of immortality that she traces in human experience and especially poetry. Turning to recent work in literary and cultural plant studies, especially the idea of vegetal cognition and “plant-thinking,” I suggest that in her letters Dickinson thinks with plants, whom she imbues with agency like Goethe and the metamorphosing plant or Henry David Thoreau and his “acquaintance” trees. Ultimately, I argue that Dickinson’s use of plants throughout her correspondence models a vegetal-focused empiricism that blends poetic language with botanical description, enabling plants to express their own agency—and immortality—to the reader. 

Paper: “Twain’s ‘Mental Telegraphy’ and the Limits of Psychological Research”

Abstract

In 1884, Mark Twain joined the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) with a letter expressing his fascination with thought-transference. As Twain describes it, this “mental telegraphy” manifests as “powerful impulses” during writing, feeling as if someone is “supplying the thoughts to me, and that I am merely writing from dictation.” Although this “telepathy” would today be considered mere pseudoscience, Twain’s narratives of the experience point to an equally remarkable phenomenon: the transference of ideas via textual narratives. Research from reception theory, affect theory, and present-day neuroscience explores how ideas developed through reading are not passively absorbed from a text, but rather formed in the “gap” between text and reader. My paper explores Twain’s relation to turn-of-the-century psychology—his acquaintance with William James; his influence on Sigmund Freud—to demonstrate how Twain’s later speculative mode of writing reveals aspects of reading then unknown to psychological science. Focusing on his late, incomplete novel, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, I argue that the speculative mode is particularly apt for creating textual gaps that readers are encouraged to fill. Thus, I suggest that Twain contributes to turn-of-the-century psychology while exposing its limits: a lesson that we can bring to contemporary scientific approaches to reading.