The Likeness of Things Unlike

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 --