The Likeness of Things Unlike - by Sharon Cameron

About the Book

"Sharon Cameron is known for rigorously and brilliantly connecting artistic achievement to ways of thinking. Her significance as a critic is in having taught us that America has not so much "evaded" philosophy as pursued it through its literature. Cameron's latest book is concerned with incommensurable, often discordant, elements of an aesthetic work and how these elements refigure the aesthetic wholes whose integrity they apparently violate. Emily Dickinson, for example, represents things that can't be experienced through the incommensurable register of sensation. Cameron wants to show how Dickinson, Emerson, Whitman, Cather, and Wallace Stevens harness incommensurables to restructure and thereby reconceive categories of a broadly philosophical nature. The works of these authors form a magnetic constellation, bestowing an unstabilized pleasure in our encounters with what can be neither integrated nor categorized"--

Book Synopsis

A study of the incommensurable, often discordant elements that define major works of American literature.

In Sharon Cameron's essays, a magnetic constellation gathers works of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Cather, and Stevens--each manifesting in its own terms "the likeness of things unlike"--to form a loose commonality in a strain of American writing in which incommensurable elements can't be integrated and can't be separated. The Likeness of Things Unlike is concerned with discordant elements of an aesthetic work and argues that these elements refigure the aesthetic wholes whose integrity they apparently violate. These intertwined, subversive elements are challenges to literary systems and are essentially philosophical in their rethinking of categories, and thus go beyond the aesthetic particulars that exemplify them.

Cameron is known for rigorously and brilliantly connecting artistic achievement to radical ways of thinking. Georg Lukcás describes the essayist as one who "adapts himself to the essay's 'smallness' of form--the eternal smallness of the most profound work of the intellect in [the] face of life." With The Likeness of Things Unlike Cameron powerfully demonstrates Lukács's remarkable insight.

Review Quotes

"Great criticism indicates how demanding works of art become if one desires the full experience of what they can make available. Such criticism elaborates how the work invites complex and intense modes of engagement. . . . In Cameron's book I encountered surprising and rich new ways of appreciating the authors on whom she focuses. Even her footnotes provide lucid and elegant modes of appreciation for how scholarship can help her readers develop frameworks for taking her objects of study as sponsoring compelling states of attention."--Charles Altieri "Critical Inquiry"

"In one of her poems, Emily Dickinson tells us that when a certain slant of light goes, it's like the distance on the look of death. Conveying the necessary, difficult relation between the sensation and the abstraction is Dickinson's work in that poem; exploring how Dickinson and four other writers articulate the paradoxically shared difference of entities that can't fit together but can't be disjoined is Cameron's work in this book. With a rare intensity, The Likeness of Things Unlike asks its readers to stretch their conceptual capacities, to think in unaccustomed ways, and it rewards with a fresh sense of what Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, and Wallace Stevens impossibly achieve. There's nothing else quite like it."-- "Douglas Mao, Johns Hopkins University"

"Cameron develops an intricate, scintillating argument about the commensurability of the incommensurate, taking us far beyond the traditional bounds of aesthetics--into philosophy, indeed quantum physics--and making us see American literature as if for the first time. A meditation on sameness and difference that takes our breath away."-- "Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University"

"For nearly half a century, Cameron has been the gold standard of literary critical brilliance in the field of American literature. In The Likeness of Things Unlike, she continues her inquiry into the intricate ways in which literary language dwells in a region populated by the incommensurable, the unaccommodated, what cannot 'be identified as this or that' because they 'emerge in excess of either, ' challenging paradigms and categories. There could be no better guide than the incomparable Cameron to chart this excitingly volatile linguistic territory. The Likeness of Things Unlike is a dazzling work of exhilarating intellectual vigor."-- "Ross Posnock, Columbia University"

About the Author

Sharon Cameron is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English Emerita at Johns Hopkins University. Among her books are Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, Thinking in Henry James, Impersonality: Seven Essays, and The Bond of the Furthest Apart: Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and Kafka.