Volume 34, Number 11 · June 25, 1987
Whose Trope Is It Anyway?
By Denis Donoghue
The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections
by Richard Poirier
Random House, 244 pp., $19.95
The Renewal of Literature is an Emersonian essay in cultural criticism; Emersonian, because many of its concerns—originality, power, genius, language—are Emerson's, and because Richard Poirier's procedures, like Emerson's, are interventions rather than sequences of argument. Indeed, the book may be interpreted as a development of Emerson's assertion, in 'Self-Reliance,' that 'power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.'
Review, 4091 words
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