Thinking in Search of a Language

Thinking in Search of a Language explores American literary and philosophical traditions, and their intimate connections, by focusing on two defining strands in the intellectual history of the United States.

The first half of the book offers a multifaceted interpretation of Emerson’s constantly shifting early-modernist thought—“I liked everything by turns and nothing long,” he said memorably—and its legacy in American writing. The second half turns to the modernists themselves and the pluralistic and radical-empiricist ways in which they engaged the world philosophically.

Herwig Friedl’s broad and deep examination of American thought, which also incorporates the international context and response, illuminates the global significance of the American intellectual tradition. Tying together all of these essays is the persistent question and problem of an adequate language or terminological framework as one kind of interpretive leitmotif. This reflects the fact that Friedl’s sensibility is steeped in a cross-pollination of continental and American thought, a combination that recalls—and is as revelatory as—the work of Stanley Cavell.