Thinking in Search of a Language: Essays on American Intellect and Intuition

Thinking in Search of a Language explores American literary and philosophical traditions, and their intimate connections, by focusing on two defining strands in the intellectual history of the United States.

The first half of the book offers a multifaceted interpretation of Emerson's constantly shifting early-modernist thought-“I liked everything by turns and nothing long,” he said memorably-and its legacy in American writing. The second half turns to the modernists themselves and the plura...