Crisis and Transcendence I: The Legacy of American Transcendentalism

HDS 2240A Subject & Catalog Number

Description

The American Transcendentalists lived, thought, and wrote in an age of upheaval. Historical criticism challenged the authority of scripture; modern science transformed prevailing conceptions of truth and nature; chattel slavery exposed the moral bankruptcy of established political and religious institutions; and industrialization unsettled inherited forms of labor, community, and selfhood. This course approaches Transcendentalism not as a genteel literary movement but as a sustained, often anguished response to these crises—an attempt to discover what remains of the sacred, the true, and the good when traditional foundations give way. Part I focuses on the tradition's fountainheads: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. We begin where the movement's public controversy began, with Emerson's Divinity School Address, delivered in 1838 in the very building where this course meets, and proceed through close reading of the major works: Nature, "Self-Reliance," "Circles," and "Experience"; Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century, her Conversations, and her New-York Tribune dispatches from revolutionary Europe; and Thoreau's Walden, "Resistance to Civil Government," and late natural history writings. Throughout the semester, we attend to the personal crises—grief, religious doubt, love, illness, friendship, and political conflict—that shaped these writers' lives, treating biography not as background but as a source of philosophical insight. The deaths of Emerson's first wife and young son, Fuller's struggle against the constraints placed on women's intellectual lives, and Thoreau's confrontations with the state each became occasions for enduring works of religious, philosophical, and literary imagination. Students will develop skills in the close reading of primary texts and in connecting those texts to the historical and personal circumstances of their composition. Assignments include weekly reading responses, a mid-semester interpretive essay, and a final essay engaging one figure's response to crisis in depth.