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Common Places: Poetry, Illocality, and Temporal Dislocation in Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Common Places: Poetry, Illocality, and Temporal Dislocation in Thoreau's A Week on the Concord... Common Places: Poetry, Illocality, and Temporal Dislocation in Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Meredith L. McGill Commonplace books are difficult if not impossible objects for historicist literary study. While they can be (and have been) studied as reflections of the sensibility of the compiler, offering the critic a valuable record of an individual’s course of reading, the attempt to read commonplace books in historical context only serves to accentuate the difference between literary criticism and its object. To the critic, entries in a commonplace book gain coherence and accrue significance insofar as they offer insight into the subjectivity of the copyist, while to the compiler these texts are heterogeneous, publicly available, valuable because external to the self. The critic makes sense of a commonplace book by placing its texts in context, and yet commonplacing draws its crea- tive charge from decontextualization. The critic takes the frag- ments that the compiler has assembled piecemeal, intermittently, and unevenly over time, and incorporates them into a narrative that testifies both to their internal consistency and to their congruency with their times. While the historicist critic must regard the com- monplace book as typical—of an era, a culture, a http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American Literary History Oxford University Press

Common Places: Poetry, Illocality, and Temporal Dislocation in Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

American Literary History , Volume 19 (2) – Mar 28, 2007

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References (24)

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
© Published by Oxford University Press.
ISSN
0896-7148
eISSN
1468-4365
DOI
10.1093/alh/ajm018
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Common Places: Poetry, Illocality, and Temporal Dislocation in Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Meredith L. McGill Commonplace books are difficult if not impossible objects for historicist literary study. While they can be (and have been) studied as reflections of the sensibility of the compiler, offering the critic a valuable record of an individual’s course of reading, the attempt to read commonplace books in historical context only serves to accentuate the difference between literary criticism and its object. To the critic, entries in a commonplace book gain coherence and accrue significance insofar as they offer insight into the subjectivity of the copyist, while to the compiler these texts are heterogeneous, publicly available, valuable because external to the self. The critic makes sense of a commonplace book by placing its texts in context, and yet commonplacing draws its crea- tive charge from decontextualization. The critic takes the frag- ments that the compiler has assembled piecemeal, intermittently, and unevenly over time, and incorporates them into a narrative that testifies both to their internal consistency and to their congruency with their times. While the historicist critic must regard the com- monplace book as typical—of an era, a culture, a

Journal

American Literary HistoryOxford University Press

Published: Mar 28, 2007

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