56. Discuss `Transcendentalism'. When and by whom was the idea developed and what influence has it had on American literature?
Przed romantyzmem w którym mieści się właśnie transcendentalizm, były okresy purytanizmu a następnie oświecenia. Tutaj założenia tych dwóch okresów, żeby można było podać co się zmieniło:
PURITANISM (1620s - 1783)
v Forms of writing:
- histories
- diaries
- chronicles
- poetry
- sermons:
1. explanation of biblical quotation
2. interpretation
3. application to the life of the colony
v Role of sermons:
> new argument in the ongoing theological debates
> a part of the political process (“Election Day's.”)
> scaring the congregation back into religious life (“jeremiads”)
v Chronicles - describe the earthly in terms of the eternal
v Literal truth substituted with potential symbolic lesson
v No novels - they divert people's attention from work
v Writing should have a practical purpose
v Belief in America being the “promised land” and Americans being the “chosen people”
v Frequent religious references
Often plain style so that common people can understand
Jednym z głównych przedstawicieli jest - William Bradford (1590 - 1657) ten od `Of Plymouth Plantation' - społeczeństwo, religia
ENLIGHTENMENT (2nd half 18th century)
The Age of Reason
v Rational approach to the world, belief in progress
v Pragmatism - truth measured by practical experience, law of nature
v Deism - God created the world but has no influence on human lives
v Idealism - conviction of the universal sense of right and wrong; belief in essential goodness of man
v Interest in human nature
A tu mamy - Benjamina Franklina (1706 - 1790) - czyli idea self-made mana
Transcendentalism
Most important works:
Emerson, Nature (1836)
Poe, The Raven (1845)
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Melville, Moby Dick (1851)
Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
Thoreau Walden (1854)
Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)
transcendentalism [Lat.,=overpassing], in literature, philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New England from about 1836 to 1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reacting against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the rationalism of the Unitarian Church, developing instead their own faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world. Transcendentalism derived some of its basic idealistic concepts from romantic German philosophy, notably that of Immanuel Kant, and from such English authors as Carlyle, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Its mystical aspects were partly influenced by Indian and Chinese religious teachings. Although transcendentalism was never a rigorously systematic philosophy, it had some basic tenets that were generally shared by its adherents. The beliefs that God is immanent in each person and in nature and that individual intuition is the highest source of knowledge led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of traditional authority.
The ideas of transcendentalism were most eloquently expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in such essays as “Nature” (1836), “Self-Reliance,” and “The Over-Soul” (both 1841), and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden (1854). The movement began with the occasional meetings of a group of friends in Boston and Concord to discuss philosophy, literature, and religion. Originally calling themselves the Hedge Club (after one of the members), they were later dubbed the Transcendental Club by outsiders because of their discussion of Kant's “transcendental” ideas. Besides Emerson and Thoreau, its most famous members, the club included F. H. Hedge, George Ripley, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, and others. For several years much of their writing was published in The Dial (1840-44), a journal edited by Fuller and Emerson. The cooperative community Brook Farm (1841-47) grew out of their ideas on social reform, which also found expression in their many individual actions against slavery. Primarily a movement seeking a new spiritual and intellectual vitality, transcendentalism had a great impact on American literature, not only on the writings of the group's members, but on such diverse authors as Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman.
For the transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains.
A trust in the individual, democracy, possibility of continued change for the better
A need to see beyond what is before our eyes, to see a deeper significance, a transcendent reality
Intellectual eclecticism; a vague conception of the God-like nature of human spirit
Nature conceived of not as a machine but as an organism, symbol and analogue of the mind
Spontaneous activity of the creative artist seen as the highest achievement
Transcendentalism and the American Past
Transcendentalism as a movement is rooted in the American past: To Puritanism it owed its pervasive morality and the "doctrine of divine light." It is also similar to the Quaker "inner light." However, both these concepts assume acts of God, whereas intuition is an act of an individual. In Unitarianism, deity was reduced to a kind of immanent principle in every person - an individual was the true source of moral light. To Romanticism it owed the concept of nature as a living mystery and not a clockwork universe (deism) which is fixed and permanent.
Transcendentalism was a 1. spiritual, 2. philosophical and 3. literary movement and is located in the history of American Thought as
(a). Post-Unitarian and free thinking in religious spirituality
(b). Kantian and idealistic in philosophy and
(c). Romantic and individualistic in literature.
Dorzucam jeszcze taki esej o transcendentalizmie:
The Transcendentalists can be understood in one sense by their context -- by what they were rebelling against, what they saw as the current situation and therefore as what they were trying to be different from.
One way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of well educated people who lived in the decades before the American Civil War and the national division that it both reflected and helped to create. These people, mostly New Englanders, mostly around Boston, were attempting to create a uniquely American body of literature. It was already decades since the Americans had won independence from England. Now, these people believed, it was time for literary independence. And so they deliberately went about creating literature, essays, novels, philosophy, poetry, and other writing that were clearly different from anything from England, France, Germany, or any other European nation.
Another way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of people struggling to define spirituality and religion (our words, not necessarily theirs) in a way that took into account the new understandings their age made available.
The new Biblical Criticism in Germany and elsewhere had been looking at the Christian and Jewish scriptures through the eyes of literary analysis and had raised questions for some about the old assumptions of religion.
The Enlightenment had come to new rational conclusions about the natural world, mostly based on experimentation and logical thinking. The pendulum was swinging, and a more Romantic way of thinking -- less rational, more intuitive, more in touch with the senses -- was coming into vogue. Those new rational conclusions had raised important questions, but were no longer enough.
German philosopher Kant raised both questions and insights into the religious and philosophical thinking about reason and religion.
This new generation looked at the previous generation's rebellions of the early 19th century Unitarians and Universalists against traditional Trinitarianism and against Calvinist predestinationarianism. This new generation decided that the revolutions had not gone far enough, and had stayed too much in the rational mode. "Corpse-cold" Emerson called the previous generation of rational religion.
The spiritual hunger of the age that also gave rise to a new evangelical Christianity gave rise, in the educated centers in New England and around Boston, to an intuitive, experiential, passionate, more-than-just-rational perspective. God gave humankind the gift of intuition, the gift of insight, the gift of inspiration. Why waste such a gift?
Added to all this, the scriptures of non-Western cultures were discovered in the West, translated, and published so that they were more widely available. The Harvard-educated Emerson and others began to read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, and examine their own religious assumptions against these scriptures. In their perspective, a loving God would not have led so much of humanity astray; there must be truth in these scriptures, too. Truth, if it agreed with an individual's intuition of truth, must be indeed truth.
And so Transcendentalism was born. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."
Yes, men, but women too.
Most of the Transcendentalists became involved as well in social reform movements, especially anti-slavery and women's rights. (Abolitionism was the word used for the more radical branch of anti-slavery reformism; feminism was a word that was invented deliberately in France some decades later and was not, to my knowledge, found in the time of the Transcendentalists.) Why social reform, and why these issues in particular?
The Transcendentalists, despite some remaining Euro-chauvinism in thinking that people with British and German backgrounds were more suited for freedom than others (see some of Theodore Parker's writings, for instance, for this sentiment), also believed that at the level of the human soul, all people had access to divine inspiration and sought and loved freedom and knowledge and truth.
Thus, those institutions of society which fostered vast differences in the ability to be educated, to be self-directed, were institutions to be reformed. Women and African-descended slaves were human beings who deserved more ability to become educated, to fulfill their human potential (in a twentieth-century phrase), to be fully human.
Men like Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson who identified themselves as Transcendentalists, also worked for freedom of the slaves and for women's freedom.
And, many women were active Transcendentalists.
When you hear the word "Transcendentalism" do you immediate think "high school English class" or "Ralph Waldo Emerson" or "Henry David Thoreau"? Very few, I'll wager, think quickly of the names of the women who were associated with Transcendentalism. (If Transcendentalism is new to you, or you're not sure what it means, check here.)
Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody were the only two women who were original members of the Transcendental Club, but other women were part of the inner circle of the group who called themselves Transcendentalists.