Thammasat University students interested in philosophy, literature, American studies, comparative religion, sociology, anthropology, ethics, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 12 November Zoom webinar on Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The event, on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 at 9am Bangkok time, is presented by the School of Humanities and Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, Hong Kong University (HKU).
The TU Library collection includes several books by and about Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=97281
According to the event webpage:
More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness.
James Marcus is the author of “Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson” (2024) and “Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut” (2004). He edited and introduced “Second Read: Writers Look Back at Classic Works of Reportage” (2010) and has translated seven books from the Italian, the most recent being Giacomo Casanova’s “The Duel” (2010).
The books by Mr. Marcus are available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet.
He was born in Boston, Massachusetts and died in Concord, Massachusetts, the United States of America.
An Open Access book available for free download, Mr. Emerson’s Revolution, discusses Emerson’s interest in Asian culture and thought. An excerpt:
While Emerson has often been viewed as the most American of writers — formulator of such a reputedly distinctive American ideal as self-reliance — it is important to recognize that he was at the same time an unprecedentedly cosmopolitan thinker, drawing on a far-flung range of sources, Eastern as well as Western. Our first public intellectual, he was at the same time our first global intellectual, and as his fame spread throughout the middle and final decades of the nineteenth century, his writings in English and in translation often found an appreciative, at times even an ardent, readership, in various non-Western lands as we
Indeed, numbered among his most admiring readers were several who went on to play momentous roles in the modern religious, literary, or political history of their respective nations, most notably India and Japan. Among Indians, these included Hindu religious reformer and missionary, Swami Vivekananda; Indian poet and Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore; and even Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi himself, chief architect of Indian independence. As colonial subjects themselves, such Indian leaders participated centrally in the tense, politically fraught, ongoing cultural and political exchange between Europe and its Asian colonial possessions.
No less significant for modern East-West religious and cultural exchange was D. T. Suzuki, the great ambassador of Zen in the West, whose work also contributed significantly to modern Japanese self-definition vis-à-vis the West.
The most conspicuous expression of Emerson’s international outlook was perhaps his precocious and, in retrospect, quite prescient interest in the classical religious and literary traditions of China, Persia and, most especially, Hindu India. For many centuries, the rich heritage of Asian civilizations had been effectively closed to the European West as a result of the vigorous expansion of Islam in the seventh century, the dominion of the Islamic Caliphates from the seventh through the twelfth centuries, and the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century.
But with Vasco da Gama’s circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, and the subsequent opening of the Indian and East Asian spice trade, barriers to intercultural exchange between Asia and Europe were once again lifted, inaugurating a period of cultural renewal in Europe that the French scholar, Edgar Quinet, referred to as the “Oriental Renaissance.”
For many European scholars and artists of the Romantic period, news of the long forgotten and, to many, unsuspected cultural richness of India and China came as an intellectual windfall. To such Romantic thinkers, India in particular came to be viewed as the cradle of Western civilization, despite what they considered the decadence of many contemporary Hindu customs.
For the sake of convenience, we might date the beginning of this renaissance to the founding in 1784 of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, a scholarly association composed initially of some thirty British civil servants working in Calcutta under the auspices of the East India Trading Company. The Society’s grand ambition was to discover everything that could be known about the human and natural history of the vast Indian subcontinent and to propagate that knowledge for a wider English and European readership. Within a few years, a torrent of translations, monographs, and articles on a wide range of subjects issued from the Society’s press totally transforming European knowledge of several Asian civilizations, past and present.
While the various authors of these studies were often accomplished amateur scholars in their own right, they all worked in one capacity or another for the East India Company and later, the British Raj. Among the chief contributors to the Society’s work were Sir William Jones (1746-1794), an accomplished philologist, and the Society’s founder and second president, who arrived in Calcutta in 1783 to join the Supreme Court in Bengal; Charles Wilkins (1749-1836), a printer for the East India Company and first European to learn Sanskrit, who produced the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gītā; Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837), an accountant turned magistrate, who wrote widely on classical Hindu religion and culture; Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800-1894), a British civil servant residing in Nepal, who put together an invaluable collection of Sanskrit manuscripts bearing on the origins and development of Buddhism; and Horace H. Wilson (1786-1860), another magistrate, who went on to become one of the most accomplished Sanskritists of his generation. But for the work of this gifted cadre of British scholar-magistrates, Emerson’s knowledge of Asian traditions would have been all but impossible.
For such lately independent partisans of American liberty as Emerson and his Transcendentalist friends, the British discovery of the traditions of India and beyond was not without a certain pointed political irony since it was underwritten and occasioned by the same British colonial apparatus that Americans had only just recently thrown off after a long and costly war of independence. Generally speaking, nineteenth-century European and American knowledge of Asian traditions and cultures often arose as an instrument or byproduct of the continued political and economic expansion of Britain and other European colonial powers in various spheres of South and East Asia.
For British magistrates working in India, one principal early motive for the acquisition of Sanskrit and the translation of selected Hindu texts was to facilitate political jurisdiction over the Indian population. Jones’s own scholarly program serves as a notable case in point. One of the first Sanskrit texts he chose to translate was the ancient Hindu legal code, the Manu-smṛti or “Laws of Manu”— a choice dictated as much by legal and political considerations as by his own scholarly interest. His groundbreaking translation, which he entitled The Institutes of Hindu Law (1794), proved to be one of the first books that Emerson — and after him, Thoreau — consulted in his first tentative efforts to acquire a knowledge of Indian traditions.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)