{"id":{"repo_id":"buffalo","oai_identifier":"oai:ubir.buffalo.edu:10477/79809"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/buffalo/oai:ubir.buffalo.edu:10477/79809","repository":{"repo_id":"buffalo","name":"Buffalo","base_url":"https://ubir.buffalo.edu/oai/request"},"display":{"title":"Globalizing Emerson: The Emersonian Event in Literature, Philosophy, and Translation","abstract":"Ph.D.","abstract_html":"Ph.D.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Godley, Min Young"],"institution":"State University of New York at Buffalo","degree_name":null,"degree_level":null,"degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Daly, Robert","English"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2019,"date_issued":"2019-07-26T17:56:00Z","date_published":"2019-07-26T17:56:00Z","updated_at":"2026-07-27T19:05:19Z","subjects":["American literature","Asian literature","gender studies"],"languages":["eng"],"rights":["Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.","Copyright retained by author."],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"http://hdl.handle.net/10477/79809","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Daly, Robert","English"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Godley, Min Young"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2019-07-26T17:56:00Z","2019","2019-05-06 20:04:31"]},{"key":"dc:publisher","label":"Institution","values":["State University of New York at Buffalo"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["Text","Dissertation"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["American literature","Asian literature","gender studies"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["eng"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.","Copyright retained by author."]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["http://hdl.handle.net/10477/79809"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["Ph.D.","Whenever scholars have attempted to situate Emerson’s legacy, whether as part of a lineage of American literary figures or as part of a philosophical tradition, there has been a tendency to evoke a fictive, unified body of privileged writers—usually white, male, and Western—within whose ranks Emerson is affiliated in order to establish his prestige or legitimacy. Yet the impulse to subordinate Emerson into a larger canon undercuts the radical potentiality of Emerson’s own insights into inheritance, that is, how to forge filiations and connections between writers and ideas that go beyond pre-conceived notions of identity as well as set spatiotemporal boundaries. Taking a cue from the ‘Emersonian event,’ an intuitive yet underdeveloped idea forwarded by recent critics, this study situates Emerson’s inheritance not in terms of influence, but as an ‘event,’ an emergence that is both localized in a specific geographical and political milieu and yet which also transcends this locality in a philosophy of the common. Taking up both “the Emersonian” and “the event” as key philosophical concepts, I combine methods of testing from Ordinary Language Criticism in analytic philosophy with the logic of the event and repetition mapped out by Deleuze in continental philosophy, in order to conceive of a Global Emerson where, through Rodolphe Gasché’s theory of “geophilosophy,” the occurrence of the Emersonian event can be traced in the work of a diverse array of authors. In Melville’s marginal writings, for example, the peculiar traces of Emerson’s “nobility” leads to the philosophical constructions of “whiteness” in Moby-Dick, where the Emersonian event is apprehended as the intensified horror in shedding one’s individuality before an experience of “universality.” This “whiteness” is given a twist in the following chapter, in the context of the color line politics of the Harlem Renassiance and the fictional and biographical writings of Nella Larsen. Testing the Emersonian event as a lived reality, Larsen constructed her gendered and racial self in a milieu where a self-reliant makings of identity for black or female subjects were virtually impossible; and her first novel Quicksand, an autobiographical novel written by an author whose autobiography was considered fictional in the first place, makes visible the complex subjectivities effectively missing from the dominant discourse.Finally, in Han, Kang’s The Vegetarian, the Emersonian event surfaces in a contemporary crisis of translation, when a controversy surrounding the English translator Deborah Smith ends up evoking Korea’s tragic colonial history in the early 20th century, Smith and Han’s defense of the translation brings to bear the uncanny repetition of the silencing of women’s subjectivity through the double repression of Japanese colonialism and Korean nationalism. Using the Emersonian event to draw attention to the silenced female voices both in the novel as well as the discourses surrounding it, the study ends with an investigation into an Emersonian ethics of reaching out, building connections, and maintaining them—even in the midst of potential ‘failed’ translations and aborted inheritances."]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["application/pdf"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Globalizing Emerson: The Emersonian Event in Literature, Philosophy, and Translation"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["Daly, Robert","English"],"dc:creator":["Godley, Min Young"],"dc:date":["2019-07-26T17:56:00Z","2019","2019-05-06 20:04:31"],"dc:description":["Ph.D.","Whenever scholars have attempted to situate Emerson’s legacy, whether as part of a lineage of American literary figures or as part of a philosophical tradition, there has been a tendency to evoke a fictive, unified body of privileged writers—usually white, male, and Western—within whose ranks Emerson is affiliated in order to establish his prestige or legitimacy. Yet the impulse to subordinate Emerson into a larger canon undercuts the radical potentiality of Emerson’s own insights into inheritance, that is, how to forge filiations and connections between writers and ideas that go beyond pre-conceived notions of identity as well as set spatiotemporal boundaries. Taking a cue from the ‘Emersonian event,’ an intuitive yet underdeveloped idea forwarded by recent critics, this study situates Emerson’s inheritance not in terms of influence, but as an ‘event,’ an emergence that is both localized in a specific geographical and political milieu and yet which also transcends this locality in a philosophy of the common. Taking up both “the Emersonian” and “the event” as key philosophical concepts, I combine methods of testing from Ordinary Language Criticism in analytic philosophy with the logic of the event and repetition mapped out by Deleuze in continental philosophy, in order to conceive of a Global Emerson where, through Rodolphe Gasché’s theory of “geophilosophy,” the occurrence of the Emersonian event can be traced in the work of a diverse array of authors. In Melville’s marginal writings, for example, the peculiar traces of Emerson’s “nobility” leads to the philosophical constructions of “whiteness” in Moby-Dick, where the Emersonian event is apprehended as the intensified horror in shedding one’s individuality before an experience of “universality.” This “whiteness” is given a twist in the following chapter, in the context of the color line politics of the Harlem Renassiance and the fictional and biographical writings of Nella Larsen. Testing the Emersonian event as a lived reality, Larsen constructed her gendered and racial self in a milieu where a self-reliant makings of identity for black or female subjects were virtually impossible; and her first novel Quicksand, an autobiographical novel written by an author whose autobiography was considered fictional in the first place, makes visible the complex subjectivities effectively missing from the dominant discourse.Finally, in Han, Kang’s The Vegetarian, the Emersonian event surfaces in a contemporary crisis of translation, when a controversy surrounding the English translator Deborah Smith ends up evoking Korea’s tragic colonial history in the early 20th century, Smith and Han’s defense of the translation brings to bear the uncanny repetition of the silencing of women’s subjectivity through the double repression of Japanese colonialism and Korean nationalism. Using the Emersonian event to draw attention to the silenced female voices both in the novel as well as the discourses surrounding it, the study ends with an investigation into an Emersonian ethics of reaching out, building connections, and maintaining them—even in the midst of potential ‘failed’ translations and aborted inheritances."],"dc:format":["application/pdf"],"dc:identifier":["http://hdl.handle.net/10477/79809"],"dc:language":["eng"],"dc:publisher":["State University of New York at Buffalo"],"dc:rights":["Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.","Copyright retained by author."],"dc:subject":["American literature","Asian literature","gender studies"],"dc:title":["Globalizing Emerson: The Emersonian Event in Literature, Philosophy, and Translation"],"dc:type":["Text","Dissertation"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-27T19:05:19Z"}