On Emerson’s Dream of Eating the World

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Published: Dec 10, 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.47743/lincu-2018-2-0120
Keywords:
books the world writing reading bibliocosmos languages cultures literary migrants translation

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Dana Bădulescu
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania

Abstract

Ralph Waldo Emerson recorded in his journal a dream that he “floated at will in the great Ether,” and “saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple.” Urged by an angel who took it in his hand and brought it to him to eat, Emerson “ate the world.” More than a century and a half later, Edward Hirsch chose the metaphor of Emerson’s dream as a motto for his book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, in which poetry is seen as a life-changing and world-embracing experience. Starting from the metaphor in Emerson’s dream, I argue that literature not just embraces the world but also transcends, and ultimately transforms it. Taking my examples from writers of diverse languages and cultures whose works embrace the languages and cultures that shaped them, I contend that literature, which is a matter of language in its most essentialised form, is not merely a whim of the intellect but also a need to free ourselves from stifling contingency and find an escape and a solace in the alternative worlds we create.

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How to Cite
Bădulescu, D. “On Emerson’s Dream of Eating the World”. Linguaculture, vol. 9, no. 2, Dec. 2018, pp. 13-24, doi:10.47743/lincu-2018-2-0120.
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Vol. 9 No. 2 (2018)
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Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Dana Bădulescu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania

Dana Bădulescu holds a Ph.D. in Philology following the defense of the thesis “Impressionistic Modes and Metaphoric Structures in E. M. Forster’s Fiction and Criticism”. She teaches modernist and postmodernist British and American literature, basic elements of literary theory and critical thinking, transculturalism, poetics and translations. She has translated books of history, philosophy, poetry, literary theory, international relations, and, most recently, Bill Bryson’s Down Under published in 2014, and Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, which came out in 2015. She has published a series of articles on modernism and postmodernism, key modernist and postmodernist writers and texts. She authored a textbook on modernism, a textbook on the nineteenth and twentieth century British novel and a book on postmodernism. Between October 2010 and March 2013 she was the receiver of a POSDRU postdoctoral grant for a project on Salman Rushdie and democracy. Since 2010 her research has been focusing on today’s migrancy, hybridity, transnationalism and transculturalism. In December 2014, she formed a national research network which joined ISCH COST Action IS 1404 “Evolution of reading in the age of digitisation (EREAD).” Her most recent book Rushdie’s Cross-pollinations was published in 2013.

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