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

About the Author

Herwig Friedl is Professor Emeritus of American Literature and History of Ideas at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, 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.

Product Description

Thinking in Search of a Language explores 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.

Review

“Friedl has now brought these essays together in an impressive volume, arranging his work into a discerning case for Emerson’s 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 pragmatism … Overall this window into the conversation between European and American philosophers of experience is quite exhilarating. Orienting Emerson by his influence on Nietzsche and defending James against Charles Taylor provides the clearest indication of the author's intention of preferring a dynamic flux to static or traditional conclusions. Summing Up: Recommended.” ―Choice

“Never has the importance of Emerson and William James to the modernization of philosophic thought been unfolded with greater subtlety, boldness, and erudition as in Herwig Friedl's Thinking in Search of a Language, the product of a scholarly lifetime of research by one of the leading interpreters of the interrelations between American and Continental traditions from Transcendentalism to Pragmatism.” ―Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Research Professor of American Literature Emeritus, Harvard University, USA, and author of Literary Transcendentalism (1973) and Emerson (2003)

“Herwig Friedl's essays on American Transcendentalism and Pragmatism have long enjoyed cult status among insiders. Reading them cover to cover is no less than a revelation. In interpretations that are original, surprising, and strikingly lucid, he pursues the perennially shape-shifting force of Being as it runs through the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Emily Dickinson, John Dewey, John Cage, and many others. The American preoccupation with the new, he shows, grows out of an orientation to that undercurrent of existence that can be sensed but not spoken. As Friedl elucidates in comparative readings unmatched in breadth and detail, this is an orientation American writers share with kindred spirits across space and time, including the Presocratics, Sa'di, Nishida Kitaro, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson. Written over 35 years, yet comprising a remarkably coherent whole, Thinking in Search of a Language is the book readers devoted to American thought have been waiting for.” ―Johannes Voelz, He