Ralph Waldo Emerson Book

While I found little that stirred my imagination in the last two chapters in regards to my own scholarship on citizenship and queer temporality, Berlant does an excellent job extrapolating both the construction of the Statue of Liberty and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, along with a select few other works. This is a case where a work of literary criticism transcends the potential siloed nature of the genre into a much larger interrogation of culture via Hawthorne as vehicle for guiding analytical thought about hegemony and political power. Berlant's concept of the National Fantasy as a myth that relegates identity is fascinating, and the way she builds in Foucault directly and indirectly makes this as much a text about how disciplinary systems work as it is Berlant's contemplation of how Hawthorne constructs historiography through (some of) his narratives.