Thinking in Search of a Language: Essays on American Intellect and Intuition [Hardcover]

Thinking in Search of a Languageexplores American literary and philosophical traditions, and their intimate connections, by focusing on two defining strands in the intellectual history of the United States.

The first half of the book offers a multifaceted interpretation of Emerson's constantly shifting early-modernist thought-I liked everything by turns and nothing long, he said memorably-and its legacy in American writing. The second half turns to the modernists themselves and the pluralistic and radical-empiricist ways in which they engaged the world philosophically.

Herwig Friedl's broad and deep examination of American thought, which also incorporates the international context and response, illuminates the global significance of the American intellectual tradition. Tying together all of these essays is the persistent question and problem of an adequate language or terminological framework as one kind of interpretive leitmotif. This reflects the fact that Friedl's sensibility is steeped in a cross-pollination of continental and American thought, a combination that recalls-and is as revelatory as-the work of Stanley Cavell.

Herwig Friedlis Professor Emeritus of American Literature and History of Ideas at Heinrich-Heine-Universit?t D?sseldorf, Germany. His book publications include a study of Henry James' aesthetic theory and, as editor, essay collections on E.L. Doctorow, on women studies as cultural studies, and on gender and conceptions of space.

Friedl has now brought these essays together in an impressive volume, arranging his work into a discerning case for Emersons innovative philosophical influence, and providing a fresh analysis of the American pragmatists and their pre-linguistic turn in modern thinking. -New Technologies in American Studies

Informed by Continental as well as American thought, these essays, shaped into a connected argument, provide a scholarly exploration of American philosophy and plÃ+