ABSTRACT
The word "radical," even defined literally, is ambiguous, and indeed, ambivalent, meaning at once "of and from the root." The Incorporation of America represents a departure not only from the approach of Matthiessen-inspired criticism but from its favored material. The revisionist criticism or heretofore submerged or suppressed writings - those of women and of blacks, for instance - sounds the depths of the cultural model it revises. Isaac Asimov described as a sort of rite of passage how he and John W. Campbell sat around one long evening meditating on the transcendent universes, after which he produced "Nightfall" and became a writer. "Nightfall's interpretation of Emerson is anti-transcendent. Sight, which is for Emerson the vehicle of transcendence, provides knowledge for Asimov in the opposite way, by marking the physical limits neither reason nor the imagination can pass beyond.
