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Examining both why and how Emerson evades the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy, this book entirely rethinks the nature of Emerson's radical individualism and its relation to the possibility of an ethics and a politics. The author argues that the quarrel between literature and philosophy never took place in America, and that instead traditional philosophical work staged itself here as a form of literary praxis and cultural therapeutics. Epitomized in the work of Emerson, this praxis takes shape explicitly in Emerson's understanding of democracy and occurs as an exchange within the act of reading. This is the exchange that Emerson so eloquently calls for in "The American Scholar" under the name of "letters." Emerson's project for American letters is the creation of a new national identity; as Less Legible Meanings makes clear, we have not yet understood the full range of implications that this project entails. After situating American letters in relation to German and British Romanticism and the features of American culture that augmented and altered their reception in the United States, the book goes on to explore the type of reading that Emersonian rhetoric engende

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