Course Info: HACU-0245

The Transcendentalist movement arose in the Boston area in the late 1830's, flourished for about twenty years, and achieved a significant level of regional and, later, national and international notoriety. Even during its most robust period, the movement never included more than a few dozen active participants. Nevertheless, it fostered several important cultural developments that continue to shape American life to the present day. Included among these were a couple of America's first utopian communities (Brook Farm and Fruitlands), the earliest American women's rights manifesto (Woman in the Nineteenth Century), the first enthusiastic appropriation of Asian religious ideas, and in the travel writings of Henry Thoreau, the nation's earliest articulate environmentalism. It also inspired some of the richest and most original literature of the nineteenth century. The purpose of this course was to introduce students to the principal writings of three of the leading Transcendentalists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau—in their own cultural, literary, and religious contexts. In the final two weeks of the term, we turned also to Transcendentalist poetry, especially as it manifested itself in the revolutionary new poetic forms of Walt Whitman, the belated Transcendentalist-inspired poet from New York.

The syllabus was designed with the following three objectives in mind: to analyze in some detail the distinctive stylistic and rhetorical features of selected Transcendentalist texts through close readings of specific passages; to understand these literary texts in the wider context of relevant religious, historical, and political pressures of American life in the decades leading up to the Civil War; and to consider critically what relevance these writings might have for us today—for us personally and for our lives collectively. To receive a formal evaluation for this course each student was expected to complete successfully each of the following four requirements: 1) three short papers, due in class on the dates specified on the syllabus; 2) a final research essay of between eight and twelve pages in length; 3) participation in one group presentation in class; and 4) regular semi-weekly participation in seminar.