Expanding the Circle: Emersonian Evasions, Islam, and Norman O. Brown

The following article is a meditation on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s intellectual genealogy as traced by Cornel West, highlighting and enacting memoir as a literary gesture central to this mode, and proposes that Norman O. Brown be included in that genealogy. The article also features original research that the author conducted at the UCSC Norman O. Brown archive, with special attention given to his lecture series, “The Challenge of Islam: The Prophetic Tradition” (1980–1981).