Emerson is known for propounding "self-reliance," but the self on which one is to rely is mysterious. In the first paragraph of the essay "Self-Reliance" Emerson enjoins us to "learn to detect that gleam of light that flashes across his mind from within...."

But how is such learning to be accomplished? The odds are not good if, as Emerson also says, scarcely one person in a generation fully exercises his or her "genius." Even the notion of "self-reliance" comes under Emerson's critique when, further along in the essay and in one of his characteristic shifts of mood, Emerson expostulates: "Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance?.... To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking."

In the seminar's final week we will consider Emerson's complicated notion of the self with one of America's most sensitive and provocative readers of Emerson's shifting points of view-Sharon Cameron, Kenan Professor of English at Johns Hopkins.

In the week's first session I will lead a discussion of two of the four texts Cameron will be examining: the early "Divinity School Address" (1838) and the late essay "Fate" (1860). (The other texts, "Self-Reliance" and "Circles") will have been discussed in week 1). Cameron will ask us to consider a "doubleness" in Emerson-for example in the "Divinity School Address," where he exhorts us to find divinity in ourselves, but in a way that goes against our own complacency and comfort. Her first session will focus on a series of "double statements" in Emerson's essay "Circles," and on "the way in which such doubleness becomes structural in the dialectic of 'Fate.'"

In her second session, Cameron will lead an open-ended discussion or, if desired, propose a series of difficult passages related to the concerns of the first session, which the participants will join her in discussing.

There will be a final reception on the evening of July 1, and a summing up and assessment session on Saturday morning, July 2nd.

Emerson, "Divinity School Address," "Circles," "Fate." Cameron, "The Practice of Attention: Simone Weil's Performance of Impersonality," Critical Inquiry, (2003), "The Way of Life By Abandonment: Emerson's Impersonal," Critical Inquiry (1998).