The Sentimental Politics of Language: Ralph Waldo Emerson's and José María Sánchez's Texan Stories
In 1828, Mexican President Guadalupe Victoria assigned General Manuel de Mier y Terán to survey the Texan boundary between Mexico and the United States and to assess the situation of Anglo-American settlers in the territory. Traveling with Terán was Lieutenant José María Sánchez, whose diary of the expedition has long been recognized as an important source document for histories of the period and region. This article asserts the literary value of Sánchez’s diary for a hemispheric study of American Romanticism. In his description of landscape as spiritual experience and his emphasis on language as creative political force, Sánchez enacts the core tenets of an Emersonian Transcendental subject, an artistic sensibility at variance with the Byronic Romantic hero of Mexican and Latin American literature of the period. This article investigates the Mexican political tensions such a Romantic position evokes while exploring the inter-American potential of a hemispheric Romanticism.
West of Emerson: The Design of Manifest Destiny
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Natural Causes: The Journals of Lewis and Clark 2. Zebulon Pike, Federalist Gloom, and Western Lands 3. The Land without Qualities: Stephen Long and William Emory 4. Emerson's 1830s 5. Emerson's Nature: West of Ecstasy 6. Thoreau and the Design of Dissent Epilogue: The Case against the Hamptons Notes Bibliography Index
Anatomy Lesson
Amazing, How the ventricles And their brutal sinews Wring to sharp shocks Down the silver fascicles And bolus raw blood Through lungs and brain, Fingertips and retinae, To the combusting, Insatiable tissues: And how it all narrows Endlessly outward From the barbarian heart Spinning shearness of capillary To get farther away Where nothing so clumsy As huge cells Can ever pass.