How Close a Reader of Emerson Is Stanley Cavell?

This article examines Stanley Cavell's method of reading Emerson—and finds it wanting in rigor and fidelity to the original. Though Cavell declares himself to be among those "who care about the Emersonian text," who are "concerned to preserve the order of words of the Emersonian text," there is a substantial amount of evidence that this is not always the case. A close reading of Cavell's readings of Emerson reveals a pattern of misconstrual and misquotation whose effect is to strip away the "otherness" of Emerson's words and further the project of refashioning him as a secular, skeptical, postmetaphysical thinker.