TRANSCENDENTALISM

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TRANSCENDENTALISM
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TRANSCENDENTALISM

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Transcendentalism

• Definition in determining the ultimate reality
  of God, the universe, the self and other
  important matters, one must transcend, or go
  beyond, everyday human experience in the physical
  world.

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TRANSCENDENTALISM

• Idea Belief in a higher kind of knowledge than
  can be achieved by human reason.

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How Did We Get Here? Historically Speaking
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How Did We Get Here? Through Literature
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TRANSCENDENTALISM

• a generation of well educated people who lived in
  the decades before the American Civil War.
• New Englanders, mostly around Boston, were
  attempting to create a uniquely American body of
  literature.
• These people believed, it was time for literary
  independence.
• They deliberately went about creating literature,
  essays, novels, philosophy, poetry, and other
  writing that were clearly different from anything
  from any other European nation.
• Men and women made up this group along with those
  who were anti-slavery.

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IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF TRANSCENDENTALISM

• Puritanism
• belief in God as a powerful force
• belief that each individual can experience God
  first-hand

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Literary Roots of Transcendentalism

• Romanticism
• placed central importance on emotions and the
  individual
• emphasized intuition and inner perception of
  truth that differs from reason
• emphasized natures beauty, strangeness, and
  mystery
• emphasized individual expression and artistic
  freedom

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Characteristics

• Everything in the world, including human beings,
  is a reflection of the Divine Soul.
• The physical facts of the natural world are a
  doorway to the spiritual or ideal world which
  hold important truths.

• People can use their intuition to behold Gods
  spirit revealed in nature or their own souls.
• Spontaneous feelings and intuition are superior
  to deliberate intellectualism and rationality.

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TRANSCENDENTAL BELIEFS

• OVERSOUL
• man, universe, and nature are intertwined

man universe nature
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Most well-known Transcendentalist authors

• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Walt Whitman
• Margaret Fuller
• Emily Dickinson
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Herman Melville
• Edgar Allan Poe

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Transcendentalism has a light side and a dark
side.

• Light Side
• All is good

Dark Side evil is an illusion
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Anti-Transcendentalists aka Dark Romantics

• Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville
• View of the world lacked optimism. They saw a
  dark side to human existence and recorded this
  aspect of human nature in their works.
• Similarities to transcendentalism valued
  intuition over reason, saw signs and symbols in
  events, spiritual facts lie behind physical
  appearances.
• Their view developed from the mystical and
  aspects of Puritan thought.
• Their works explored the conflict between good
  and evil, psychological effects of guilt and sin,
  and madness and derangement in human psyche. When
  id goes bad.
• They saw the blankness and the horror of evil
  within humanity.

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Where does Edgar Allen Poe fit in the Dark Side?

• Considered a Dark Romantic
• Poe is viewed as a Gothic writer.
• Poes works strongly represent Gothic elements
  more so than valuing intuition over reason or
  examining the natural world for God and spiritual
  truths.

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Gothic literature

• Settings- include large, drafty old houses that
  have "been in the family for years." 
• Atmosphere of mystery and suspense
• A ghostly legend, an unexplainable occurrence, or
  a story about a horrible death or murder .
• Omens, foreshadowing, and dreams usually play a
  large role in the mysterious air that is created
  within the story.
• Include highly charged emotional states like 
  terror, a feeling that one is on the brink of
  insanity, anger, agitation, an exaggerated
  feeling of some impending doom, and obsessive
  love.

• Supernatural events  ghosts, doors that open
  themselves, unexplained sounds, etc.
• Damsels in distress are frequent.  Women who are
  frightened and confused, wandering around lost,
  or dying due to a slow and unexplainable ailment.
• Words designed to evoke images of gloom and doom
  dark, foreboding, forbidding, ghostly, etc.
• Romantic themes often involve the death of a man
  or woman in the throes of some great passion, the
  obsessive nature of a man (id) or woman in love,
  or excessive grief one feels upon the loss of a
  loved one.

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TRANSCENDENTALISM

• Transcendentalism began with a few and grew.
• This philosophy lasted for several years in New
  England
• It ended as the Civil War began.

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