American Literature

American Literature Early American Literature Transcendental Literature

Outcomes of the lesson • Timeline overview of American Literary Movements • Early American Literature overview and timeline • Emphasis on Transcendental Era, beginning with the philosophic and historic context. • Writing style, major themes, methods of interpretation and author’s intent of Transcendent works • Notable writers of the Transcendent era and their works

Prior Knowledge Inquiry • Transcend (Latin: trans, beyond; send, to climb) means to rise above or go beyond the limitations of. With this meaning in mind, what themes do you think will be pronounced in Transcendental literary era? Why do you think the readers and writers of Transcendental literature were responding to or reacting against?

Point of View Inquiry Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality. ~Immanuel Kant • German philosopher, Immanuel Kant is one of the great originators of transcendental thought in the western world. Knowing that Kant’s thought on cognition and intuition influenced the questions, themes and ideas of Transcendental writings what tropes do you think might have made Transcendental literature distinct from the previous eras (Puritan, Age of Reason and Romantic)? • Furthermore, how do you think the Transcendentalist’s may have conceived of God, creation or which religious beliefs might they have held?

Literary Movements Modernism Romanticism Contemporary and Post-Modernism Age of Reason Realism Transcendentalism Puritan Era

Early American Literature Transcendentalism Age of Reason/ Enlightenment Romanticism Puritan Era

Transcendental Literature circa 1830-1850

American Romantic Literature Era 1800-1860 1840 1860 1800 American Renaissance Subgenres: Dark Romantics Transcendentalists

Transcendental Timeline William Henry Channing (1810-1884) My Symphony Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) Conversation with Children on the Gospels Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) Women in the Nineteenth Century Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1888) Nature Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Walden George Ripley (1802-1880) Founded Transcendental club in 1836 Theodore Parker (1810-1860) Discourse on the Permanent and Transient in Christianity

American Renaissance http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/american-renaissance-uniquely-american-art-literature-and-culture.html# Transcendent Literature overview http://education-portal.com/academy/topic/transcendentalism-in-literature.html

Transcendental Literature • Transcendental Literature was a uniquely American expression. They believed that knowledge could be arrived at not just through the senses and reason (experience), but through intuition and contemplation of the internal spirit. This spiritual mediation was manifest through their writings, as well as their social and political activities. Furthermore, Transcendentalists believed in the inherent goodness of people and creation. • Derived as a protest against culture and society, many Transcendentalists writers came out of Harvard Divinity School and the Unitarian Universalist Church; they would become critics of both Harvard intellectualism as well as all institutional religions.

Primary Transcendent Influences • Transcendental Literature was a uniquely American literary movement that had ideological roots in Europe and America.

Transcendental Ingredients German Idealism – Philosophy of Immanuel Kant • Adherents to Transcendentalism believed that knowledge could be arrive at not just through the senses, but through intuition and contemplation (German Idealism). Moreover, one’s perception of events and mean-making activity was always unique to oneself. English Romantic Literature • A predilection to turn to natural world for intimations of truth was a recurrent theme in Romantic literature. Nature can free the mind, imagination and intuition from the impositions of society. American Social Movements • Expansionism, slavery, women’s rights, education. Transcendent literature was socially active by nature, advocating for women’s suffrage, abolition, conservation of the environment, as well as other social policies regarding the treatment of prisoners, ethical aspects of expansionism, government criticism, education, and moral and ethical lifestyle choices.

Immanuel Kant and the German Frankfurt School of Thought Everything humans experience is filtered through sensory perception and the mind. Therefore, each person’s sense of reality and truth is distinct into only themselves. In this sense, Kant claims, “perception is reality.”

German Idealism and Immanuel Kant Kant developed theories on the nature of human knowledge titled, The Critique of Reason, which he called ‘transcendental idealism’ or ‘critical idealism.’ Kant proposed that the mind has “categories of understanding” which are constructed through one’s personal experience, and are then codified or compartmentalized in the mind, for one to make sense and meaning of their experience in the world.

Intuition This being the empirical nature of physical life, Kant then posits that humans do not receive all knowledge from sensory experience alone, nor from reasoning through it. In addition to these cognitive faculties, human being possess, intuition. • Intuition (Latin): a direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process; immediate apprehension; in philosophy, pure, untaught, non-inferential knowledge. True knowledge inferred through immediate perception.

How does one critique reason? • In his magnum opus, The Critique of Reason, Kant wrote, “We can have cognition of no object as a thing in itself, but only insofar as it is an object of sensible intuition, i.e. as an appearance… We assume the distinction between things as objects of appearance and the very same things as things in themselves, which our critique had made necessary.” In other words:

English Romantic Writers • William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell • Biblical prophecy as romantic and revolutionary • William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads • This work marked the beginning of the English Romantic period. Poems were to be “considered as experiments.” William Blake (1757-1827) William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Themes of English Romanticism Influencing Transcendentalism • Individual over society, or individualism over hierarchical orders • Tone is melancholic, restrained yet deep and full • Reaction against the Age of Reason writing, yet gradual commitment to social causes • Power of Nature to create strong impressions in the mind and imagination • Tone is observant, meditative, and aware of the connection between living things and objects (subject/object)) • Past, present and future merge together in the human consciousness (space/time) • Writer and landscape are in complete harmony or communion with each other

American Social Movements • Temperance • Educationand literacy • Prisons and asylums • Abolition • Feminism and women’s suffrage • Native American treatment Reform Movements of the 19th Century http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/the-transcendentalism-movement-and-social-reform.html#

The Transcendental Experience • Transcendentalism was more than a literary genre; it was a philosophical and spiritual movement with social implications. It was a way of seeing and being in the world, that produced various works of art (writings and paintings) to fortify, symbolize and stylize itself. The literary works of the Transcendentalists, like those of the Puritans and the Age of Reason, were given birth through an emerging belief system – a ideology – carried by a unique group of individuals who shared similar backgrounds, ways of seeing and interpreting. The term “Transcendent” would come to mean more than “beyond experience” to denote “through experience.”

Transcendentalism as a spiritual, cognitive and social movement • The Transcendentalists were individualist- centered New Englanders who had grown critical with the imported Calvinism of the Puritans, and broke with this established authoritarian status quo. They then became the founding participants and elders within the Unitarian Universalist Church. • The then, modern Unitarian Universalists attempted to conjoin the empirical thinking of John Locke with the Christian faith in the unknown or the apophatic. Therefore, they still gave the Bible authority as a revelational text of divine inspiration, and they believed in miracles. • Due to this belief, a group of disaffected Unitarian clergy then broke off from the church to develop Transcendentalism. They had discomfort with a blind faith, or a trust in the unknown. They read the Bible as product of human history and culture. They emphasized the power and authority of the mind to make-meaning. • In Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “why should we not a have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs.” Here, Emerson asserts that people should not concede to authoritative institution or book to understand their personal experience or intuitive insight. For Emerson and the Transcendentalists, one’s experience, along with their intuitive insight was enough to construct knowledge. • One’s experiential knowledge was also informed by intuition (Kant). Therefore, if the mind and imagination (internal) are informed by the physical (external) world, so also the mind and imagination (internal) shapes one’s perceptions of the corporal (external) world. Therefore, the mind’s intuition or a prior knowledge remains the primary power for constructing meaning through experience in time and space. Furthermore, the mind is powerful, yet it is also fallible.

The Transcendental Club first met in 1836 in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a conversational club for disaffected Unitarian Clergy. It was founded by George Ripley, a Unitarian minister and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. The Transcendentalists had grown to distrust all hierarchical institutions; and, this was true of established churches as well as Harvard University. Ripley left the Unitarian church to found the Transcendental community, Brook Farm. • The Transcendentalists met over 30 times in a four-year period. • They sponsoreda journal titled, The Dial, where their ideological writings were published. • They experimented with several utopian communities including: Brook Farm, Fruitlands and Walden. • After developing their ideology in their communities, they began to interweave their observance of the social order into their social activity – praxis. They were then motivated to become write and act on behalf of abolition, women’s rights, education and literacy, environmental conservation, Native American treatment, the war with Mexico, and they exercised criticism toward the government.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Born in 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts to an Unitarian minister, Emerson was raised solely by his mother after the age of eight, because his father died of stomach cancer. As a child, Emerson was given a classical education, he attended Harvard College, and then Harvard Divinity School. He worked as a school teacher, lecturer, Unitarian pastor and he received a generous inheritance upon the death of his first wife. Regarded as leading figure of Transcendentalism, Emerson championed individualism, and critiqued authoritarian institutions. He penned his first ground-breaking essay articulating Transcendental philosophy in 1836 – Nature. This poetic piece related his understanding and fulfillment of experience through an intercourse within nature. He wrote, “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universe Being circulate through me; I am part of parcel of God.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson • His other seminal essays followed including: Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. He predominantly emphasized themes concerning individualism, freedom, human-potential, self-actualization and the “infinitude of the private man.” His aunt explained his work, Self-Reliance, as a “strange medley of atheism and false independence.” As a founder of the Transcendental Club, Emerson did not live in a Transcendental community, however he did support several of his Transcendental friends who were impoverished by the experimental life-style, including Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau. • Analysis of Emerson’s Self-Reliance: • http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/ralph-waldo-emersons-transcendental-poetry-self-reliance.html

Henry David Thoreau Born into a modest New England family of pencil manufacturers in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau is distinguished as a leader in the Transcendental movement. He attended Harvard College, and then elected to become a school teacher when the more conventional jobs of law and business did not interest him. He returned home from Harvard and took a school teaching position in his home town at Concord Public School, however he resigned a few weeks later because he refused to enact corporal punishment. He then opened a progressive grammar school, called Concord Academy, with his brother John. However when his brother died in 1842 in his arms, he closed the school. During this time, he met Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom he developed a friendship. Emerson would bring Thoreau into his influential circle of writers and thinkers, and he encouraged him to contribute to The Dial.

Henry David Thoreau • Thoreau was a writer, poet, philosopher, naturalist and minimalist by nature, and he would grow into becoming a tax resister and social activist for abolition and environmental conservation (despite accidentally starting a fire in Walden woods that devoured 300 acres!). • In 1845 he embarked on a two-year, two-month and two-day simple living experiment; he moved into a small, self-made cabin on the shores of Walden pond, on Emerson’s property, 1.5 miles from Emerson’s family home. • In 1846 Thoreau would run into a tax collector who demanded he pay six years of delinquent taxes, and Thoreau refused due to his opposition to the Mexican-American war and slavery. He was thrown in the local jail for the night, and released the next day because a family member or friend paid his taxes, against his wishes.

Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience • This night in jail for tax evasion inspired Thoreau to write his first determining work, Civil Disobedience which was published in 1849. He argues that individuals should not allow governments to overrule their consciences, furthermore it is one’s personal duty to disallow the government from making one a tool of injustice. Thoreau believed that citizens should stop paying taxes when their government acted unjustly, and court prison, as a measure of one’s ethics, if necessary. In Civil Disobedience he wrote, • “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also prison… where the State places those who are not with her, but against her, -- the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor… Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence… If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. Analysis of Civil Disobedience: http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/henry-david-thoreaus-civil-disobedience-summary-and-analysis.html

Thoreau’s Walden • Walden is Thoreau’s autobiographical account of his two years, two months and two days of living simply on Walden pond. For brevity, he condensed his experience into one year for the publication of Walden in 1854. He used the seasons of the year as a symbol of human development, and the writing combines allegory and metaphor alongside scientific observations. Furthermore, Thoreau’s knowledge is explained as his perception rather than logic, as he explores the double-consciousness, of what human say and what they actually do. Thoreau was seeking the integrity that comes from the interwoven consistency of the two. Thoreau’s words are often figurative, despite being grounded in the land, because he is seeking knowledge through his experience. The major themes presented in the text are: self-reliance, simplicity, the falsity of progress, nature, perception, critical awareness

Walden

Thoreau’s Walden In Walden Thoreau wrote, I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential fact of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live to sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; of if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursions. ~Henry David Thoreau Analysis of Walden: http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/henry-david-thoreaus-walden-summary-and-analysis.html

Margaret Fuller • While Emerson and Thoreau gave lectures in favor of social change, Margaret Fuller was the only Transcendentalists who actively pursued social change through policy. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1810 she was given solid early education, and was discouraged that she was unable to attend Harvard. She did secure a job as a school teacher, however her lack of access to a higher education, would motivate her to take on educational and employment reforms for women. She was astutely committed in advancing the causes of abolition, women’s rights, and overall social equality. She was considered to be the most well read citizen of New England, and was the only female granted admission to Harvard’s library.

Margaret Fuller, The Dial and Women In the Nineteenth Century Emerson recruited Fuller to be the first editor of the Transcendental journal, The Dial, and she held this position from 1840-1842, and Emerson took on the duties from 1842-1844. This journal published the work of the Transcendentalists, and Fuller’s first masterpiece, The Great Lawsuit; Man Versus Men. Woman verses Women, was published therein in 1843. This work would be published again in 1845 under the name, Women in the Nineteenth Century. It is a feminist piece with a satirical twist. Fuller shows off her familiarity with classical works and style, by arguing that Men will rightfully inherit the earth when they become truly elevated by understanding Divine Love, rather than the abiding in the current condition of humanity where there is oppression, abuse and inequality. She advocates for women’s education, intellectual, religious, economic and political freedom, and well as for women’s employment.This work it is widely considered to be the first feminist work from the Americas.

Emerson’s Critique of the Transcendentalists • In the 1840s Emerson begins to critique the isolated Transcendentalists for “not (being) good members of society” because they “were not working for “the abolition of the slave-trade” in their untouchable utopian communities. They lived, according to Emerson, “a life without love, and an activity without an aim.” This motivated the Transcendentalists to apply their energies in to social reforms.

Summary: Principles of Transcendentalism • Knowledge is gained through sensory experience, reasoning and intuition • The Over-Soul/pantheism • Reverence for the natural world • Simplicity over Materialism • Self-Reliance • Civil Disobedience

Evaluation Inquiry: To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common—this is my symphony. ~William Henry Channing This quote from Channing’s poem, My Symphony is a classic of Transcendental literature, capturing the major themes of this literary era. Judging from this quote, infer the major themes pronounced within Transcendental writings. Then, explain how the Transcendental movement changed from its conception to its end. Evaluate why this change occurred due to the historic context of the movement.

American Literature