Vocabulary 7 is due tomorrow, 14 January
Clip: Promessa http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ic8ruziJ48
In class: Romanticism in art, connecting the image and language. This will be our transition into American Romanticism or Transcendentalism.
Qualities of Romanticism
1. Love of Nature
2. Idealization of Rural Living
3. Faith in Common People
4. Emphasis on Freedom and Individualism
5. Spontaneity, intuition, feeling, imagination, wonder
6. Passionate individual religiosity
7. Life after death
8. Organic view of the world
Below is a copy of the class handout. Make sure you are very familiar with this information.
Romanticism in America
The term Romanticism designates a literary and philosophical theory that tends to see the individual at the center of all life, and it places the individual, therefore, at the center of art, making literature valuable as an expression of unique feelings and particular attitudes. Although Romanticism tends at times to regard nature as alien, it more often sees in nature a revelation of Truth, the "living garment of God," and a more suitable subject for art than those aspects of the world sullied by artifice. Romanticism seeks to find the Absolute, the Ideal, by transcending the actual, whereas realism finds its values in the actual and naturalism in the scientific laws (C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon). This movement manifests itself in America through the continual westward movement, inventions by individuals that would transform the American community through technology and agriculture (Samuel B. Morse’s telegraph, John Deere’s steel plow, and Cyrus McCormick’s reaper), a women’s rights movement (Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention), crusades to protect the mentally ill (Dorothea Dix) and movement to crush the institution of slavery (Lucy Stone and Sojourner Truth). This idealism was put into practice through utopian communities (Brook Farm, Hopedale, Fruitlands, Northhampton and the Amana Church Society- all failed except for the latter, which remains today).
Transcendentalism
Most, if not all of the writers, in America were influenced by the Transcendentalist movement then flourishing prior to the Civil War. Emerson and Thoreau were the best known. Thoreau is the best known Transcendentalist, but the ferment of Transcendentalist ideas affected many other writers, some of whom hovered on the fringes of the movement, some of whom opposed it.
Transcendentalism has many facets, many sources and encompasses a range or beliefs whose specific principles depend on the individual writer or thinker. The term itself and some of the ideas came from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his Critique of Practical Reason, published in 1768, Kant refers to the “transcendental,” which to him meant the knowledge or understanding a person gins intuitively, although it lies beyond direct human experience. New England Transcendentalism drew on other philosophical theories besides Kant’s, including those of Pascal, the French mathematician and moralist and Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist and mystic. In addition, it drew on Buddhist thought and German idealism.
Philosophy, religion and literature all merged in New England Transcendentalism, producing a native blend that was romantic, intuitive, mystical, and considerably easier to recognize than explain. They recognized few absolutes beyond an all-encompassing belief in the unity of God and the world. Even self-contradiction might be necessary, as Emerson stated in his much-quoted sentence: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
For Transcendentalists, the point was that the real truths, the fundamental truths, lay outside the experience of the senses, residing instead in the “Over-Soul…a universal and benign omnipresence…a God known to men only in moments of mystic enthusiasm, whose visitations leave them altered, self-reliant and purified of petty aims.”
To some, however, the Transcendentalist’s view of the world was too rosy. Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne are paired as anti-Transcendentalists, who explored man’s “dusky” nature.
The material we will be covering in the next week includes
Herman Melville excerpt from Moby Dick
Ralph Waldo Emerson excerpt from Nature and Self-Reliance
Henry David Thoreau excerpts from Walden
Selection of New England poets: Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell
John Greenleaf Whittier
HOMEWORK FOR TOMORROW: Friday 14 January.
Make sure you have read the following from Emerson's Nature.
EMERSON – from “NATURE”
Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough , and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.
Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
