The Likeness of Things Unlike: A Poetics of Incommensurability

A study of the incommensurable, often discordant elements that define major works of American literature.

In Sharon Cameron’s essays, a magnetic constellation gathers works of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Cather, and Stevens--each manifesting in its own terms ＂the likeness of things unlike＂--to form a loose commonality in a strain of American writing in which incommensurable elements can’t be integrated and can’t be separated. The Likeness of Things Unlike is concerned with discordant elements of an aesthetic work and argues that these elements refigure the aesthetic wholes whose integrity they apparently violate. These intertwined, subversive elements are challenges to literary systems and are essentially philosophical in their rethinking of categories, and thus go beyond the aesthetic particulars that exemplify them.

Cameron is known for rigorously and brilliantly connecting artistic achievement to radical ways of thinking. Georg Lukcás describes the essayist as one who ＂adapts himself to the essay’s ’smallness’ of form--the eternal smallness of the most profound work of the intellect in [the] face of life.＂ With The Likeness of Things Unlike Cameron powerfully demonstrates Lukács’s remarkable insight.

Sharon Cameron is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English Emerita at Johns Hopkins University. Among her books are Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, Thinking in Henry James, Impersonality: Seven Essays, and The Bond of the Furthest Apart: Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and Kafka.