Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles

by Sharon Cameron

Although Emily Dickinson copied and bound her poems into manuscript notebooks, in the century since her death her poems have been read as single lyrics with little or no regard for the context she created for them in her fascicles. Choosing Not Choosing is the first book-length consideration of the poems in their manuscript context. Sharon Cameron demonstrates that to read the poems with attention to their placement in the fascicles is to observe scenes and subjects unfolding between and among poems rather than to think of them as isolated riddles, enigmatic in both syntax and reference. Thus Choosing Not Choosing illustrates that the contextual sense of Dickinson is not the canonical sense of Dickinson.

Considering the poems in the context of the fascicles, Cameron argues that an essential refusal of choice pervades all aspects of Dickinson's poetry. Because Dickinson never chose whether she wanted her poems read as single lyrics or in sequence (nor is it clear where any fascicle text ends, or even how, in context, a poem is bounded), "not choosing" is a textual issue; it is also a formal issue because Dickinson refused to chose among poetic variants; it is a thematic issue; and, finally, it is a philosophical one, since what is produced by "not choosing" is a radical indifference to difference. Extending the readings of Dickinson offered in her earlier book Lyric Time, Cameron continues to enlarge our understanding of the work of this singular American poet.

271 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 1993

About the author

Sharon Cameron teaches nineteenth-century American literature and twentieth-century American poetry. She received her Ph.D. at Brandeis University, and has taught at Boston University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, UCLA, and Johns Hopkins, where she has been the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English since 1985. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Reviews

[Eve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in turgid academic style, but full of really interesting and compelling ideas... For me it was worth the slog, but the same may not be true for you... (also, for a 1992 book to overlook the possibility that the beloved might actually be female in the case of ED feels a little strange...)

That being said, here's a pretty great description Cameron makes of the experience of reading Emily Dickinson: "What is repeatedly insisted upon is radical connection -- as poems are not divided, as the dead and the living are not divided, as the "I" and the "you" are not divided, as speech from the center and speech from the margin are not divided, as the presumptive speech of the speaker and the presumptive speech of the reader are -- can be said -- not to be divided. To read Dickinson's poetry is to be thrust into territory where words issue from her consciousness as if it were our own." (p.188-9)

[Chabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely loved it!