Abstract

Understanding demonism in Socratic terms, scholars take antebellum American demonology to mean personal identification with an apophatic process that undoes empirical differences to reveal a single, monolithic identity. Against this dialectical orientation, my dissertation, Ecstatic Empiricism: Demonism without Despair in American Literature, uncovers an alternative demonological tradition in the context of American literature, a tradition that embraces what is irreducibly plural about sensuous life. Building on archival discoveries, Ecstatic Empiricism debuts Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s autobiography in the intellectual formation of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville, who each read the volume and comment on its concept of the demonic as enabling ecological experience. Through both close and contextually dense study of the writings of Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, and Melville, I track a strain of demonism that celebrates the revelatory power arising from episodes of sensory and material meltdown, whereby all that was interior gets externalized, and experience moves from a subjective to an impersonal register. Thoreau’s famous Mount Katahdin epiphany, where “Demonic Nature” disperses him into agitated matter, is one clear instance of this pattern. Another irruption of “demonism in the world” occurs as the workings of Melville’s whale make all that is not just incompatible but mutually exclusive in life collide, shattering—or releasing—Ishmael’s humanity. Drawing on a set of post-humanist frameworks, I argue that the demonological tradition I uncover constitutes a historically specific and momentous attempt to replace a normatively centrist account of the human with a vision of radical and impersonal dispersion. By their demonism, Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, and Melville reject the dilemma of fragmentary existence. Instead, they affirm and embrace the tragic conditions of life through the ek-stasis—the standing outside of oneself—that demonism brings forth.