High Culture of Mass Culture?

At some point in our class discussion of Emerson today Onno said that Emerson really facilitates the split between writing for a mass audience and writing for a higher literary culture. It seems as though Emerson was one of the first authors of the time to write to an elite few, highlighting the value of his rich ideas rather than the numbers of people reading them. In comparison to Emerson, it seems as though in Last of the Mohicans Cooper was trying to tow the line between writing for both high culture and a large mass of people. Through subtle yet different literary techniques in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans and Emerson's Nature we can examine who they were trying to reach from a literary standpoint, and how they were trying to reach those populations.

To focus specifically on Emerson's Nature, as we briefly discussed today, Emerson seems to cater to a small and elite group of readers. He begins his essay with an epigraph that quotes a Roman philosopher from another book written in 1820 called The True Intellectual System of the Universe. From the very first line of the essay he angles his discussion of nature towards people of a higher level of education. His essay continues to be crowded with other literary references that are used to support Emerson's argument, including a very specific reference to the "NOT ME" (most anything else beyond oneself that thus qualifies as nature) which, as the footnote states, "draws on Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus." As Onno was saying in class today, Emerson was incredibly well read and clearly read many other types of literature from all other languages and cultures, however much of his essay is packed with referential evidence to support his points. This conscious choice to include references to elite forms of literature makes this essay much less susceptible to a lower class and thus begins to facilitate the aforementioned split between lower culture and high literary culture.

In a similar way, Cooper also opens every chapter of The Last of the Mohicans, with epigraphs. We began to discuss this in class, however, to extend on that, I think it's really intriguing that Cooper was catering to a larger audience hoping for popularity and that he wanted to make available a higher form of literature to the masses of the public. As other people have discussed in their posts, he opens his chapters with references to Shakespeare, Walter Scott, and Charles Parnell. However, unlike Emerson, his references are meant to emanate a sense of higher culture for the purposes of attracting people to his novel rather than scaring them away with an elite level of intelligence. Throughout The Last of the Mohicans Cooper doesn't make nearly as many references in need of footnotes as Emerson does, and he barely mentions any literature throughout the novel beyond what is quoted in the epigraphs of each chapter.

I find these two approaches to writing very interesting: Emerson uses his high level of intelligence to support his point and to relate to those with the same level of education as him; whereas Cooper uses his intellectual references as a hook to those who feel they need a higher education. It really intrigues me that these were effective strategies in these two authors getting what they wanted for their work's reception. Cooper's work was very popular, and even though some apparently though Emerson was a little crazy his beautiful language and discourse of nature are now held in very high opinions.