Emerson’s Genius and the Present Academic Age

The Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures is pleased to invite you to a lecture by Dr David Heckerl (St Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada).

“I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me.” These words of Ralph Waldo Emerson inspire a peculiar account of the relation between our private and public identities. In Emerson’s view, it is precisely by withdrawing from immediate social demands that each of us discovers, in deepest solitude, a richer public or representative quality. This experience of genius also instils a capacity for irony, an existential condition recently defined by the philosopher Jonathan Lear as being in the grip of a certain unusual manner of questioning our lives.