“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 parcel of God” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," 1836).
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s "Nature" can be seen as the founding text of American Transcendentalism – an important movement in philosophy and literature that began as a religious movement in the 1830s and lasted until about 1860. It attempted to substitute a rationalist view of world with “a Romanticized version of the mystical ideal that humankind is capable of direct experience of the holy” (Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture, 1986). In this course we will first examine the philosophical background of the movement before we will turn our attention to several key statements of the doctrine, such as Emerson’s essays (“Nature,” “The American Scholar,” “The Harvard Divinity School Address,” and “Self-Reliance”), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), and Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1843; selected essays). In a subsequent step, we will explore the ways poets such as Walt Whitman (e.g., “Song of Myself”) and Emily Dickinson pick up the basic transcendentalist ideas in their poetry and, finally, chart the path from American Transcendentalism to modern ecocritical thought.
A reader with a collection of essays and poems will be made available at the beginning of the course. Students are expected to purchase the following novel:
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods (Dover Thrift Edition)
