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The American Renaissance and Transcendentalism. Search for American Literary Identity. By the mid-19th century, people were wondering if America could produce great writing. Hawthorne & Melville. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville became friends
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Search for American Literary Identity By the mid-19th century, people were wondering if America could produce great writing
Hawthorne & Melville • Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville became friends • Saw a dark side to human existence: sought to record this aspect of human nature in their works • Melville wrote a patriotic essay urging Americans to create their own literary identity
Declaration of Literary Independence “American Renaissance” • Means rebirth • Describes the explosion of American literary genius
Pioneers of American Literature • Nathaniel Hawthorne • Herman Melville • Ralph Waldo Emerson • Henry David Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson • Inspired reform movements to • Improve public education • End slavery • Elevate status of women • Improve social conditions • Inspired utopean projects - plans for creating a perfect society
Transcendentalism • Transcend: to exist above and apart from the material world • By meditation, by communing with nature, and through work and art, man could transcend his senses and attain an understanding of beauty, goodness, and truth
Roots of Transcendentalism • Puritans • Jonathan Edwards: God reveals himself through the physical world • Romantics • William Cullen Bryant: death is simply part of the life cycle
A Transcendentalist’s View of the World • Everything in the world, including human beings, is a reflection of the Divine Soul. Each individual soul is made up of the same stuff as the universal soul (kind of like the idea of The Force in Star Wars)
A Transcendentalist’s View of the World • The physical facts of the natural world are a doorway to the spiritual or ideal world (the spiritual world is simply a reflection of the natural world and vice-versa) • People can use their intuition to behold God’s spirit revealed in nature or their own souls
A Transendentalist’s View of the World • Self-reliance and individualism must outweigh external authority and blind conformity to custom and tradition (like Romanticism, the individual is the most important) • Spontaneous feelings and intuition are superior to deliberate intellectualism and rationality (like Romanticism)
Emerson & Transcendentalism • Emerson’s utopian group known as “The Transcendental Club” • Most influential transcendentalist • “Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact”
Emerson & Transcendentalism • Intuition over logic • Intuition = our capacity to know things immediately through emotions rather than reasoning • Contrasts with rational thinking of someone like Benjamin Franklin • Opposed deism (the idea that the universe was rationally designed by divinity who endowed humanity with reason)
Emerson & Transcendentalism • Optimism & Idealism • God can be found directly in nature and the individual - discover this, and you will find meaning in life • Natural events can be explained on a spiritual level (think “Thanatopsis”)
Thoreau & Transcendentalism • Stayed secluded in a cabin at Walden Pond in Massachusetts to rediscover the grandeur and heroism of a simple life led close to nature • Wrote in a style that imitated nature • Walden is one of the most well-known works produced in America
Thoreau & Transcendentalism • Protested Mexican War • Refused to pay poll tax • Radical abolitionist • “Resistance to Civil Government” • Essay on passive resistance • Inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Thoreau & Transcendentalism “I should have told them at once that I was a Transcendentalist - that would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations."
Sources • Lit Book p 206-214, 230-231 • http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/icon/transcend.html • http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/ • http://www.google.com