Impersonality: Seven Essays

by Sharon Cameron

Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. Sharon Cameron ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and figures of international modernism—writers for whom personal identity is inconsequential and even imaginary. In essays on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, Cameron examines the impulse to hollow out the core of human distinctiveness, to construct a voice that is no one’s voice, to fashion a character without meaningful attributes, a being that is virtually anonymous.


“To consent to being anonymous,” Weil wrote, “is to bear witness to the truth. But how is this compatible with social life and its labels?” Throughout these essays Cameron examines the friction, even violence, set in motion from such incompatibility—from a “truth” that has no social foundation. Impersonality investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, and even destroys the person as a social, political, or individual entity, of writing that engages with personal identity at the moment when its usual markers vanish or dissolve.

Genres: Philosophy, Essays, Nonfiction

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

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.