Emerson's Moving Assignments
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2014 Committing to the Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments Karinne Keithley Syers Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/295 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] COMMITTING TO THE WAVES: EMERSON'S MOVING ASSIGNMENTS by KARINNE KEITHLEY SYERS A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2014 ii © 2014 KARINNE KEITHLEY SYERS All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy. _____Professor Joan Richardson________ ___________________ __________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee _____Professor Mario DiGangi_________ ___________________ __________________________________ Date Executive Officer _____Professor Ammiel Alcalay________ _____Professor Wayne Koestenbaum____ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract COMMITTING TO THE WAVES: EMERSON'S MOVING ASSIGNMENTS by Karinne Keithley Syers Adviser: Joan Richardson Committing to the Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments reads Ralph Waldo Emerson as a writer of assignments for living and working whose senses can be taken up across a wide array of creative and exploratory fields. Shifting between an interdisciplinary array of contexts ranging from philosophy and poetics to dance, performance, and somatic movement experiments, I join the practical sense of creative inquiry embodied in these fields to the abstract images of Emerson's assignments. I argue that Emerson's descriptions of intelligence and power, and so his approaches to navigating skepticism and loss, as well as the non-possessive sense of what “self” actually means to this thinker of “self-reliance” can be illuminated by reading from the non-dualist perspective that embodied inquiry offers. The dissertation also enacts the self-reliance that Emerson calls for by taking up my response to Emerson through my sense of his assignments. The first half of this study uses this embodied work as a resource for reading Emerson, situating his sense in relation to extra- literary and extra-philosophical research. The second half of the dissertation makes a pivot, taking Emerson as a resource for performance assignments, first in the form of a chapter written with poetic constraints, which approaches the question of how philosophical commitments might animate theater and actual performance, and finally by following Emerson's instruction to the scholar to dive into her “privatest presentiments” to find where that privacy meets a public intelligence and intelligibility. The dissertation concludes with the documentation of Another Tree Dance, an original performance generated from that Emersonian private dive. v Acknowledgements The three members of my committee have modeled and encouraged a relationship to scholarship based in delight, in pleasure, in life, and taught me to find critical energies there. This dissertation grew directly out of the rich environment of Joan Richardson's American Aesthetics seminar. I owe Joan my profound gratitude for the illuminations of that room, as well as her mentorship through this process, in which she gave me both the room to pursue idiosyncratic pathways, and challenged me to account for those navigations with precision. Wayne Koestenbaum taught me a great deal about the pleasure of sentences and the tiny attractions and forces of their parts and possibilities. I learned the virtue of economy while writing essays of exactly two pages in his Lyric Essay seminar. The third chapter of this dissertation calls directly on the energies and animations he teased out of that room. The energies and animations of Ammiel Alcalay's seminars have from the first day of my graduate study reminded me that an impassioned thinking traverses many disciplines and demands the freedom both to call upon the authority of work that may not be recognized, as well as to recognize the imaginative limitations of all forms of authority. He reminds me to ask what a discipline might be and to attend to those who bring poetic and imaginative thinking beyond their assigned corners and into basic ways of living in the world. Professor Nancy K. Miller has also been a significant, generative, and generous teacher of the process of understanding what forms, sounds, and areas scholarship can approach. Three friends in this program have rendered scholarship a form of conversation, and I wouldn't have wanted to do it without their community: Stefania Heim, Matthew Burgess, Sara Jane Stoner. My dear friends and collaborators Sara Smith and Gina Siepel have always helped me locate this project in the larger circles of my life. Thanks to my mentors from earlier scenes of education who welcomed me into generative spaces and pushed me beyond any easy consolidation of charm or identity as an artist or teacher: Donna Faye Burchfield, Mac Wellman, and Wendy Woodson. Thanks to the people of the downtown dance community, and the dance artists who introduced me to the living body and in whose presence I first found pathways into the sun-bright Mecca of embodied intelligence, in particular Wendell Beavers, Melanie Rios Glaser, K.J. Holmes, Bebe Miller, and Gwen Welliver. Thanks to my parents who taught me to read and sent me to school alive with curiosity. And at home, always, Phil Syers and our beautiful, sensitive creature of a son, Harvey. vi Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 I put some amount of my being into this picture. CHAPTER ONE 44 “Where do we find ourselves?” Thinking and Locating in Emerson's “Experience” CHAPTER TWO 112 It thinks, I move: An Embodied Approach to Impersonality CHAPTER THREE 184 Fragment Assignments: Eight Approaches to the Sound of Philosophy CHAPTER FOUR 240 Another Tree Dance: An Essay in the Form of a Room APPENDIX ONE 303 Card Deck from Another Tree Dance APPENDIX TWO 312 Grid Score from Another Tree Dance APPENDIX THREE 313 Performance photographs from Another Tree Dance WORKS CITED 326 vii List of Illustrations INTRODUCTION Figure 1 4 Karinne Keithley, “Everything Worthy” from The Ghost Host Pigeon Post (2007), paper. Figure 2 5 Karinne Keithley, “Our Compensations” from The Ghost Host Pigeon Post (2007), paper. Figure 4 28 Karinne Keithley, “Something to Do” from The Ghost Host Pigeon Post (2007), paper. Figure 5 35 Karinne Keithley, still image from American Studies (2008), stop-motion digital video. Figure 6 36 Karinne Keithley, still image from American Studies (2008), stop-motion digital video. CHAPTER TWO Figure 1 181 Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Body Systems in BMC, excerpted from Sensing, Feeling and Action CHAPTER THREE Figure 1 188 Emily Dickinson, MS 822a, in Emily Dickinson Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library. Figure 2 195 Emily Dickinson, MS 254, in Emily Dickinson Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library. viii Figure 3 200 Emily Dickinson, MS 778, in Emily Dickinson Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library. Figure 4 210 Emily Dickinson, MS 790, in Emily Dickinson Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library. Figure 5 216 Emily Dickinson, MS 252, in Emily Dickinson Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library. Figure 6 222 Emily Dickinson, MS 752, in Emily Dickinson Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library. Figure 7 230 Emily Dickinson, MS 865, in Emily Dickinson Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library. Figure 8 235 Emily Dickinson, MS 754, in Emily Dickinson Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library. APPENDIX 1 Figures 1-18 303-311 Karinne Keithley Syers, Sara Smith & Luke Hegel-Cantarella, Card Deck from Another Tree Dance (2013), paper. ix APPENDIX 2 Figure 1 312 Karinne Keithley Syers, Grid score from Another Tree Dance (2013), paper. APPENDIX 3 Figures 1-27 314-325 Brian Rogers, performance photographs of Another Tree Dance (2013), digital images. x Abbreviations Texts by Ralph Waldo Emerson are abbreviated as follows: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte — EL Natural History of Intellect — NHI Texts by Stanley Cavell are abbreviated as follows: Emerson's Transcendental Etudes — ETE Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome — CHU Texts by Joan Richardson are abbreviated as follows: A Natural History of Pragmatism — NHP 1 INTRODUCTION I put some amount of my being into this picture. ONE. Backgrounds I did not mean to spend all this time reading Emerson. I set out to write a dissertation on a life commitment to experimenting read through a series of American writers for whom Emerson forms a philosophical background. I set out to write this dissertation because I have made a life commitment to experimenting, and I wanted to keep the company of these writers. The texts I wanted to spend time with all produced an imaginative space of intense quiet, disorientation, and delight, something I once tried to describe as a form of serenity-bewilderment (imagine it as German