REFLECTIONS ON RUMI'S RECEPTION IN AMERICA

Abstract

The paper attempts at seeing the recent reception of Rumi in America in relation to the contemporary critical reformulations of the Emersonian aesthetic ideal through postmodern critique of deconstruction. The paper suggests that despite the transformations of romanticism in the Emersonian and the deconstructive thought that open considerable critical grounds for the reception of a figure like Rumi, both the discourses still submit to a certain "epistemic tyranny" that may allow the criticism industry today to cash in upon Rumi in ways that may turn "the sacral into the banal".