In Walden Thoreau writes of the traveler approaching a swamp who asked a boy if the swamp was passable, if it “had a hard bottom. ” The boy, Thoreau says, “replied that it had. But presently the traveller’s horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, 'I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom.' ’so it has,' answered the latter, 'but you have not got half way to it yet' “ (W 330).

So it is with Walden itself. Most readers approach Walden assuming that they will find the “hard bottom ” of its truth in the popular cultural myth of Thoreau as the hermit sitting meditatively by Walden Pond. It is a myth of retreat, a myth of a return to Eden, a myth of stasis, and it is a very appealing myth to a postindustrial society faced with overwhelming change. That myth is in Walden, to be sure, but the alert reader will find that it does not take him or her any more than halfway to the full significance of the book. A closer reading of Walden reveals a Thoreau who is often less interested in stasis than in change, less interested in meditation than in a journey of exploration.

Thoreau’s own journey in Walden took him physically no farther than Walden Pond, a mile and a half outside Concord. The plan to live alone by a pond had been on his mind for years. In 1837 during the summer after his senior year at Harvard, he lived in a bachelor cabin with his friend Charles Stearns Wheeler (Harding 49). As early as 1841 he wrote in his Journal of building his own cabin by a pond (Sandy Pond, at first): "I want to go soon and live away by the pond… . But my friends ask what I will do when I get there? Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons?" ( PJ 1:347). His first published essay, "Natural History of Massachusetts" (1842), had indicated his interest in studying and writing about nature. Living by a pond would be convenient for the nature study, which might lead to other publishable essays.

This chapter investigates two things. It looks at erasure of race in Wharton's writing, the ostensible nonexistence of race as a category despite the fact that Wharton lived at a time and led her life in such a way that racial difference was an inescapable part of life. Second, it is about the actual, important presence of race as a category in Wharton's work once we pay attention to her inclusion of color and, even more subtle, her representation of whiteness as racial. (That is, this essay asks readers to move beyond the dominant-culture practice of defining race only as that which belongs to nonwhites.) To paraphrase Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), my first concern might be expressed: What do we make of Edith Wharton's positing her “writerly self” as “unraced” - without racial signification - in a culture obsessed with racial designation? My second might be phrased: How does our reading of Wharton and of Wharton texts change when we understand whiteness not as nothing, or as an absence, but as the presence of constructed racial meaning?

“Hast seen the White Whale?” gritted Ahab in reply. “No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all,” said the other good-humoredly. “Come aboard!” “Thou are too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?” “Not enough to speak of - two islanders, that's all; - but come aboard.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, (chap. 115) “It warn't the grounding - that didn't keep us back but a little. We We blowed out a cylinder-head.” “Good gracious! anybody hurt?” “No'm. Killed a nigger.” “Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.” Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (chap. 32) The second of these passages, too familiar to require much commentary, is frequently instanced as a dramatic rendering of much that is noteworthy about Huckleberry Finn:The centrality to the novel's purpose of questions of racial prejudice; the transparent irony disclosed in Aunt Sally's anxious question and her genuine relief that no “people” were injured; the canniness of Huck himself, who, though perplexed by this sudden relative who calls him “Tom,” knows enough about human nature to invent yet another fictional experience and adopt yet another persona on the instant, but is totally unaware of the satire, irony, or humor of his own remark.

When Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855, one of the most remarkable aspects of Whitman's idiosyncratic volume was the engraving of a daguerreotype of the poet that appeared opposite the title page (see Figure 8.1). Since the title page did not contain the author's name, the visual image stood as a kind of surrogate identification, as if the authorizing presence of the volume was more effectively represented by an illustration than by the more conventional linguistic sign. The reader was greeted with a body in print unaccompanied by a name in print.

That engraving has come to be one of the most familiar icons in American literature. Much has been written about the image - how it represented Whitman as a “common man,” a worker instead of an intellectual, a poet whose poems emerged from his body and not just his head, a person who lived outdoors (or at least who was so contemptuous of social conventions that he wore his hat indoors and would not, as he indicated in the preface to his book, take it off to signal subservience to anyone, even - and especially - the president). It was an emblem of the poet of the body more than of the poet of the soul. The image centered on the torso instead of the face, and the portrait indicated that the poetry that would emerge from such a poet would be different from what had come before - earthier and more direct and more sensual. Over the next century, the image would prove to be highly influential: It gradually worked to transform the way most American poets portrayed themselves on their book jackets and frontispieces. A growing number of poets traded their coats and ties and face portraits for a1 fresco body poses in informal clothes - poses that echoed, again and again, Whitman's originating image of the poet as literal outsider.

Literary naturalism derives mainly from a biological model. Its origin owes much to Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, based in turn on his theory of natural selection. Darwin created a context that made naturalism - with its emphasis upon theories of heredity and environment - a convincing way to explain the nature of reality for the late nineteenth century. But before Darwin's ideas were available in literary form, they had to be transformed by Emile Zola in his Roman expérimental (1880). Zola, in turn, based his theories of heredity and environment on Prosper Lucas's Traité. . . de l'héredité naturelle (1850) and especially Claude Bernard's Introduction l'étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865). Zola believed that the literary imagination could make use of the ideas in these books so long as the novelist functioned like a scientist, observing nature and social data, rejecting supernatural and transhistorical explanations of the physical world, rejecting absolute standards of morality and free will, and depicting nature and human experience as a deterministic and mechanistic process. All reality could be explained by a biological understanding of matter, subject to natural laws, available in scientific terms.

Years ago, in a first attempt to describe Whitman's presence in Latin America, I said: “Studying Whitman in the poetry of Hispanic America is like searching for the footprints of a ghost that can be felt everywhere but is nowhere to be seen.”

At the University of Iowa's international meeting in homage to Whitman in 1992, once again I felt the presence of this familiar ghost. It was springtime. Observing known and unknown faces, listening to foreign accents, and deciphering allusions made with fascinating ambiguity created a certain magic among us. We were participants in a chorus that, in strange harmony, expressed the frustration of not being able to communicate all that we were saying to each other.

Then I thought that just as every generation of Whitmanists conceives a Whitman model that is characteristically related to its concept of poetic art, each culture also finds a way of translating Whitman in order to integrate him into its own conception of life.

Our Chinese colleagues explained why Whitman cannot be translated into their language in the way Westerners translate him. They gave the name of the insurmountable barrier: sex. Then I understood their long metaphorical tangents, their omissions, and their strange rhetoric. Indirectly, they were telling us that each people makes of Whitman's art an overwhelming metaphor and of his person an imposing, intricate symbol. Whitman's followers accommodate him to the size of the dream that is, in truth, his peculiar poetic art.

Only months before she died in a freak automobile accident in Nice, France, in 1927, strangled by the same scarf with which she danced the impassioned Marseillaise, Isadora Duncan completed her autobiography, My Life. Twenty-five years after catapulting to international acclaim as the “barefoot dancer” from California, Duncan proclaimed the poet Walt Whitman one of her three “dance masters.” With the bravado typical of her after-concert lectures, she hailed Whitman as the “supreme poet of our country”and credited his poetry with having instilled in her “my great spiritual realization of life” (Duncan, My Life, 31, 341). To many of those who had followed the progress of her dance across three continents and nearly as many decades, Duncan's disclosure only confirmed what they had long since determined for themselves. Writer and editor Max Eastman was among those who perceived in Duncan's dance a strong Whitmanic presence. In his memoirs, Eastman extolled “that warm witty magnetism” with which she danced, terming her “not only a supreme artist. . . [but] also a creative and a moral force.” For him as for others of his generation, “[s]he really became, as she thought to, a winged apostle to the whole world of Walt Whitman's vision of a poised and free-bodied and free-souled humanity, carrying his thought to hearts that never heard of him.”

Many women novelists tell a story of female defeat. Nineteenth-century fiction is particularly full of women characters who cannot make peace with the options available to them in their society, characters who cannot fulfil their needs or resolve their conflicts. Rarely if ever do these protagonists find a form through which to tell others their story as (at least to some extent) their novel-writing creators did. Like their protagonists, Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton are often said to have failed in creating a “new plot” for “women's lives.” Yet the identification of writer and character should be entertained with caution. For Chopin and Wharton themselves, professional authorship meant redefining their position as women within turn-of-century American society. The novelistic enterprise also meant reaching an audience with their version of a woman's life - only partially a version of their own.

Edith Wharton, who was never obscure or forgotten, has been rediscovered a number of times. In 1938, the year after she died, Edmund Wilson published a famous essay, “Justice to Edith Wharton,” because he felt that the notices at her death had underestimated her achievement. Between The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920) she had attained, he thought, an intensity - the consequence of secret personal anguish - which made her “important during a period . . . when there were few American writers worth reading.” He deplored the lowering of her reputation by the effect of her later, inferior works, written when some of this anguish had passed. Unquestionably, Wharton's powers had waxed and waned, as Wilson said. But the life curve of her reputation, whether measured by critical blame or esteem or by popular success or failure had not been governed by the issue of literary achievement alone; it was her subject matter and presumed personal attitudes that chiefly provoked response.

Husserl began to publish on problems in the philosophy of mathematics and logic soon after he received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1881, and he continued to publish on them throughout his lifetime. Although much has happened in the foundations of mathematics since the turn of the century, many of Husserl's ideas are still relevant to recent issues in the philosophy of mathematics. In this essay, I argue that a number of the views on mathematics that are part of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology are more compelling than current alternative views in the philosophy of mathematics. In particular, I indicate how Husserl's views can be used to solve some basic problems in the philosophy of mathematics that arise for (naive) Platonism, nominalism, fictionalism, Hilbertian formalism, pragmatism and conventionalism.

A PRÉCIS OF PROBLEMS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS

Many of the basic problems in the philosophy of mathematics center around the positions just mentioned. It will not be possible to discuss these problems in any detail here, but at least some general indications can be given.

A major difficulty for Platonism has been to explain how it is possible to have knowledge of immutable, acausal, abstract entities like numbers, sets, and functions. Once it is argued that these entities are abstract and mind-independent, there seems to be no way to establish an epistemic link with them that is not utterly mysterious. The apparent insurmountability of this problem might persuade one to abandon Platonism altogether in favor of some form of nominalism. The nominalist will at least not have the problem of explaining how knowledge of abstract entities or universals is possible, because on this view there simply are no abstract entities or universals. There are only concrete spatio-temporal particulars, and it is argued that however one ends up construing these, there will be no great mystery about how we could come to know about them. One could work quite naturally, for example, with a causal account of knowledge.

ANALYSIS OF KNOWING AS CENTRAL TO HUSSERL'S WORK

Clarification of the nature of knowledge (Erkenntnis) is the primary aim of Husserl's philosophical work, at least up to 1913, when he completed Section Four of Ideas I. In his earliest work he was concerned with the analysis of specifically mathematical knowledge, but he soon realized that the main issues in that area had to do with knowledge in general rather than with mathematical knowledge as such. Thus, his first major work, the Logical Investigations (1900- 1901), became an analysis of the nature of knowledge in general and of the conditions of its possibility. Volume II is titled “Investigations in the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge” and culminates in the “Sixth Investigation” which is an elaborate statement on what, exactly, knowledge is. That investigation is titled, “Elements of a Phenomenological Clarification of Knowledge,” and indicates in its opening words that such clarification has been the aim of the “Investigations” all along. The Sixth Investigation is the counterpart of Section Four in the later Ideas I (1913), where, with some novel elements and emphases, he once again gives an account of the nature of knowledge (see note 2 of §145), but now as a phenomenology of reason or noetic phenomenology.

ON THE DESCRIPTION OF PERCEPTION

Husserl seems to have devoted roughly equal amounts of energy and pages to the description of perception, judgement, and imagination. By “description,” he meant the analysis of the traits and components of mental states or acts and their objects. As his views changed over the years about the nature of intentionality and philosophy, the descriptive psychology of the Logical Investigations (1900/01) gave way to descriptive programmes in which the objects of perception and of judgement were conceived of in terms of a new, analytic framework; in particular Husserl lost interest in describing the things and processes in the real world that are the objects of perception and judgement and so too in describing their relations to these acts. His new analytic framework, particularly as it applies to perception, has been thoroughly expounded and discussed in the literature. My aim here is to expound Husserl's first descriptions of perception within the framework of the Investigations and to incorporate as far as possible his later descriptive results to the extent that these are separable from his later turn to idealism.

Mark Twain was always intensely engaged by two important nineteenth-century cultural conversations, one addressing issues of race, the other theories of the unconscious. His later writings in particular are known both for their explicit anti-imperialism, and the charged racial awareness it produced, and for their flirtation with spiritualism, dream theory, and a variety of occult phenomena. Each of these cultural arenas, the racial and the psychological, has been recognized individually as a major force shaping Twain's imagination, but how they might have interacted to produce his large body of late, mostly unfinished (and some unpublished) writings has yet to be determined. The later works, the group of fantastic, quasiphilosophical pieces, now published in volumes with such titles as Which Was the Dream? and Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years and Mark Twain's Fables of Man, all written around the time of Twain's 1895-6 world lecture tour and after, are themselves part of the challenge, in that they have always raised for readers and scholars a range of fundamental problems: at issue are their textual status and generic location, their aesthetic “incoherence,” and their apparent “retreat” from both the humor and the social and political engagement that make Mark Twain one of our bestloved national authors.

Edmund Husserl is generally considered to be one of the greatest German philosophers of the twentieth century. Even though the influence of his works has waned somewhat on the European continent, his star is rising in the Anglo-Saxon world. Analytic philosophy has assimilated Husserl as a fellow-contributor to the research programme of a theory of meaning. In particular, Husserl's concept of noema is often regarded as a richer and generalized alternative to the Fregean notion of Sinn.

How should one evaluate Husserl's place in the history of modern philosophy? Seen from an analytical perspective, Husserl may appear to be a transitional thinker, well ahead of his time, who anticipated the linguistic turn. Many passages from his works might be quoted to substantiate this interpretation. Husserl claims, for instance, that “all real unities are unities of sense.”