Outline for Meredith McGill's "Common Places: Poetry, Illocality, and Temporal Dislocation in Thoreau..."

I chose this article because I think Meredith McGill is one of the clearest writers that I've encountered in my scholarly life. I've broken it down paragraph by paragraph, but you don't need to read it all. I'm going to do a general overview first, but reading Hayot's article made me think about essays on the paragraph level (though it would be waaaaay time intensive to outline an article Hayot-style-no, thanks).

General overview of the article: McGill's article is interesting because it does not make a definitive claim about a literary object. This is not an article about interpretation. Instead, this is an article that asks critics to revise their own habits and contemplate the ways 19th century commonplace books might be more important as a kind of genre, or a set of conventions, that influenced two of the most celebrated American authors, Emerson and Thoreau. The introductory section begins with how commonplace books have been overlooked, giving a history of them in relation to literary criticism, showing how they've become disconnected from more popular subjects like travel narratives (though McGill claims this attitude is opposite to how 19th century people would have thought of them), and lays out how Emerson and Thoreau collaborated on a commonplace book and how that might be central to their theories about literary creation and authority.

Then, McGill gives a section on Emerson, where she focuses on how we've been reading Emerson's connection to Whitman and poetic theory wrong. Basically, our preconceived notions (preconceived by decades of scholars) of Emerson as a failed poet and as Whitman's Pygmalion have made us read "The Poet" all wrong. Emerson is less invested in literary nationalism and more interested in the ways poetry gets read/consumed in the present time (as opposed to a national legacy). After explicating some Emerson, she returns to the connection between Emerson and Thoreau (their friendship and their projects).

The next section on Thoreau begins with a reiteration of the depth of the friendship between the two men, but this time she acknowledges its rifts. She then turns to how Thoreau reconciles Emerson's poetic theories in A Week and points to its numerous deviations from the accepted travel narrative. By inserting bits of poetry (fragmented pieces without authorial attribution like in the commonplace book), McGill claims that Thoreau sees history and nature as being independent of the poet. Since this is not the brunt of the argument, McGill quite comfortably points out the problem with Thoreau's ideas about the beauty of dislocation (mainly that it does not provide an ethical imperative for remembering history) and ends on an ambiguous question. However, again, I want to point out that the thesis of this article was to prove that commonplace books have more influence on literature than critics have previously thought and could provide keys to new interpretations, rather than advancing a definitive interpretation herself.

I notice that McGill used the Emerson/Thoreau friendship as a through-line for the whole article-she kept returning to it as a way of contextualizing and transitioning between sections. I also noticed that there's not a lot of close-reading; only about 6 out of the 25 paragraphs were actual explication. Perhaps that's just because this isn't necessarily an article about interpreting a text, but rather advancing a new methodology. In any case, below this break is an intense map of the article.

Opening paragraph: describes commonplace books and how they have been read by the critic. Points out the problem with literary criticism’s treatment of commonplace books-they are too personal to be “historical” or they are generic and, thus, nothing can be said about them.

First body paragraph: sets up the premise of the article: we are looking at commonplace books the wrong way. McGill will use the shared commonplace book between Emerson and Thoreau to illustrate ways of reading Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Emerson’s poetics that have been previously overlooked. The commonplace book is neither a personal diary or a historical artifact-in this article it becomes a genre ,a set of stylistic conventions that McGill sees as underpinning Thoreau’s disjunctive temporal and locational narrative.

Second body paragraph: McGill then details how critics have gone wrong with the commonplace book. Some of the problem is that there’s a deviation from thinking about poetry in conjunction with travel. Then McGill goes on to show how that’s the opposite of how 19^th century people thought: they took poetry with them on their travels, used poetic conventions in their travelogues/descriptions, and used poetry to make sense of cultural dislocation. Critics who study travel writing prioritize narratives.

Third body paragraph: Describes how poetry is central to A Week (commonly thought of as travel writing), and details how much poetry and what kind are in the narrative to demonstrate that poetry is indeed central to the travel writing of the book.

Fourth body paragraph: Describes how Thoreau came by these poem, by way of Emerson, as a planned collaborative project that never took off. However, their commonplacing shaped their thinking about poetry and cultural transmission (her central claim).

Section 1: Emersonian Commonplaces

Fifth body paragraph: Further develops the connection between Emerson and Thoreau on this project, particularly Emerson’s encouragement of Thoreau’s pursuit of poetry. Narrows down her thesis by specifying that she will discuss how commonplacing influenced Emerson’s poetic theory and how Thoreau’s A Week is an example of how Thoreau tried to put those theories in practice.

Sixth body paragraph: Gives a history of Emerson’s commonplace books and how they have been excluded from his literary corpus, though Emerson himself published a version of his commonplace books himself in 1870. However, this erases Thoreau from the equation.

Seventh body paragraph: Describes the history of commonplacing as a way to textualize the classical past. By interacting with these mental ideas about classical writings and physicalizing them as a way of understanding them, McGill claims commonplace books are actual a mode of cultural transmission. Though it’s an individual practice, McGill says that it’s actually anti-individual as it demonstrates how texts could be collectively understood.

Eighth body paragraph: 19^th century people weren’t really using them to understand he classics any more, but they were still a site where they could construct a version of the texts they were reading for themselves. For example, McGill points to how these books were organized in multiple ways except for chronological. Achronicity then becomes the first stylistic convention of this new genre. McGill makes an argument about how the fragments of poetry are democratized on the page, so established “literature” could share a page with a folk song or whatever. Commonplace books, especially Emerson, resists all the ways we think of as conventional organizing. There’s not a constant level of value or concept or time that makes these books immediately legible to us. Hoiwever, this lack of an anchor is what McGill uses to transition to the Thoreau section: the illocality of the commonplace book is what Thoreau grapples with in relation to textual authority.

Ninth body paragraph: Some remarks about how copying is a practice that denies the author of the poem complete authority and gives more agency to the reader, without which the poem could not circulate.

Tenth paragraph: Because we have preconceived ideas of Emerson as a failed poet, McGill argues that we’ve overlooked aspects of his poetic theory.

Eleventh: Continues to illustrate how thinking about Whitman as Emerson’s production of the perfect American poet makes us miss things in Emerson’s poetic theories.

Twelfth: McGill argues that Emerson is more interested in contemporaneous poetry rather than literary nationalism and argues that we have misread Emerson’s “The Poet.” Emerson doesn’t advance a theory of poetics based on self-reliance at all, but is actually interested in giving the self over to lyric transport, timelessness, and the half-possession characteristic of reading and writing poetry.

Thirteenth paragraph: Close reads some Emerson to prove the previous points.

Fourteenth paragraph: McGill advances the theory that Emerson thought of poesis as transcription rather an act of independent creation. So, Emerson transforms nature into poetry; the poet transcribes what they experience in nature.

Fifteenth paragraph: McGill returns to asserting how all the examples she’s detailed fit copy-book conventions.

Section 2: Decontextualization and the Transmission of Culture

Sixteenth paragraph: Re-emphasize connection between Thoreau and Emerson, though acknowledges the many rifts in their relationship.

Seventeenth paragraph: McGill pushes for reading the Emersonian ideal poet as being Emerson/Thoreau hybrid rather than Whitman. Thoreau attributes more agency to nature and uses poetry to cement an unconventional connection to the past rather than to overcome dislocation. Describes A Week as a text prone to locational slippage, even though we think of it as being a New England text.

Eighteenth paragraph: Describes the strangeness of the text, noting its roots in many forms: the travel narrative and the commonplace, which seem antithetical as the former is grounded in specificity and location and the latter being multi-vocal, unattributed, and discontinuous.

Nineteenth paragraph: Close reading of Thoreau ro prove some of the previous features.Posits that by interpolating poetry, Thoreau is able to transmit certain cultural details that go unnoticed by their participants and by scholars.

Twentieth paragraph: Describes Thoreau’s disdain for the travel narrative, particularly its egocentrism and makes the case that his use of poetry makes it seem like the natural world performs culture and decentralizes the poet.

Twenty-first paragraph: More close reading of Thoreau that demonstrates Thoreau’s ideas about how the past is connected to the present.

Twenty-second paragraph: More close reading, with particular attention to tense forms.

Twenty-third paragraph: More close reading about how the past is embedded in the landscape.

Twenty-fourth paragraph: Points out that the independence of artifacts (like the independence of quotes in the commonplace book) is troubling since it does not seem to induce memorialization, but Thoreau thinks that the moment art fragments is beautiful and does capture some of the “memorial” quality of history.

Twenty-fifth paragraph: Thoreau does not give a clear sense of time and place and McGill argues that Thoreau thinks it is when we are disconnected from these things that we are ourselves the most, though it means we have no ethical responsibility to remember the past. McGill ends on an ambiguity.