Know Thyself: Emerson's Pedagogy of Recollection

Ralph Waldo Emerson's style is dense with contradictions that become more comprehensible when placed in the philosophical tradition of anamnesis, or doctrine of recollection. Anamnesis, for Emerson, is an interlinked epistemology and rhetorical strategy. Recovering the histories of anamnesis underpinning his work will generate new readings of his rhetorical style as inherently pedagogical. To make this point, I address the tendency of current scholarship to overlook Emerson's work as an educator by outlining its anamnetic context. In particular, it analyzes key features of his rhetorical style (provocation, obscurity, metaphor) as pedagogical devices in "The American Scholar."