Desire, the self, the social critic

the long version

In Desire, the Self, the Social Critic, Professor Buckley shows that while few transcendentalists ever agree for long on philosophical or epistemological matters, four of them develop the use of "antisocial" desire into a transcendental critique of nineteenth-century American culture. Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson represent the individual's inherent divinity and the individual's inherent ability to transcend the exigencies of the sensate world in terms that might appear to be homosexual, bisexual, or "pansexual." They alone among their contemporaries give expression to desire for the social other, give expression to desire for the self not to be seen in the heterosexist, homophobic, misogynist social realm of everyday life.