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English Language and Literature Commons

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Democracy and Education

Journal

2013

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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Repair To The Lamps And Rake The Language, Daniel Malachuk Jun 2013

Repair To The Lamps And Rake The Language, Daniel Malachuk

Democracy and Education

Boatright and Faust rightly recommend Emerson’s active reading style, but they misrepresent him as pragmatist who believed readers to be “makers of meaning.” Emerson was a transcendentalist whose fundamental message was that moral “truth exists, though all men should deny it.” Especially in his antislavery writings, Emerson teaches two ways for readers to find (not make) these moral truths in the texts they read: by reading with their souls, or intuitively (“repairing to the lamps”), and by reading for the facts (“raking the language”) that will awaken moral sensibilities. Rather than continue to invent an Emerson who flatters our contemporary …