... his poetics of transcendental idealism by shifting the rhetorical grounding from metaphor to metonymy. Emerson proposes metonymy as the primary figure in his new scientific poetics, a natural-analogical basis of all writing, all thinking, and life itself. Emerson's "metonymy," I argue, figures a more empirical, if not ecological, way of thinking about writing and writing about thinking. In this way, "metonymy" names or anticipates ... drink the atmosphere with the planet dissolved in it." Thoreau continues in the journal entry, "The man of science discovers no world for the mind of man ...

• Word Count: 9971
• Approx Pages: 40
• Grade Level: Undergraduate