Johannes Voelz's Transcendental Resistance takes issue with the New Americanist interpretive paradigm in American Studies and cultural criticism. For the last twenty years, practitioners within this model have approached cultural texts—particularly those of the nineteenth century—as irrevocably implicated in a hegemony that enshrines bourgeois liberalism and imperialist expansionism. Voelz argues that Emerson—and perhaps by implication, many canonical nineteenth-century texts—need not be read as the Ur-texts of an inherently imprisoning social order. Instead, he views Emerson's rhetoric as a response to the challenges and opportunities offered by public lecturing. The seeming contradictions and aporiae in his texts, Voelz argues, are part of a deliberate strategy for appealing to the sense of possibility and uplift for audiences, while at the same time offering stringent critiques in ways that will not entirely alienate.

Transcendental Resistance is the first work published in a new series, Re-Mapping the Transnational, edited by Donald Pease. Pease played a major role in launching the New Americanist movement. Practitioners, despite varied approaches to their subjects, purposed to transform American Studies as a field through epistemologically self-reflexive criticism designed to advance “a struggle for cultural justice” (Pease, “9/11: When Was ‘American Studies After the New Americanists’?” Boundary 2 33, no. 3 [Fall 2006]: 78). Is Voelz's work an example of a new space in American Studies for work that moves away from totalizing critiques? One can hope.