Crisis and Transcendence II: The Legacy of American Transcendentalism
HDS 2240B
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
Part II of this yearlong course follows the Transcendentalist tradition beyond its founders, asking what it means to inherit a tradition and how a body of thought born in one crisis is transformed by the crises that follow. If the fall semester examined how Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau forged Transcendentalism in response to the upheavals of their age, the spring examines the writers who received that inheritance and improvised upon it—often radically—from the Civil War era to the present. We begin with Walt Whitman, Transcendentalism's first great inheritor, and with the reform tradition of Lydia Maria Child, Theodore Parker, and Frederick Douglass, in whose hands self-reliance became abolition. We then trace the tradition's philosophical legacies through the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Jane Addams, and John Dewey, with particular attention to the religious dimensions of The Varieties of Religious Experience and A Common Faith; its political and prophetic legacies through W. E. B. Du Bois, C. Wright Mills, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin; and its contemporary renewals in Stanley Cavell's Emersonian perfectionism, Cornel West's prophetic pragmatism, Richard Rorty's liberal ironism, and the ecological and literary writings of Jane Bennett, Terry Tempest Williams, and Rebecca Solnit. Throughout the semester, students consider how the tradition's central commitments—self-culture, dissent, the divinity of ordinary experience, the moral demands of democracy—are tested, revised, and extended under new conditions
Course Notes
Students are not required to have taken HDS 4220A Crisis and Transcendence I: The Legacy of American Transcendentalism.
Available for BTI Cross Registration
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
Religion and Ecology
Religion, Ethics, and Politics
Religious Thought, Philosophy, and Theology
Racial Justice and Healing
Humanism
Non-Tradition Specific
Unitarian Universalism
Unitarian Universalism
