美国文学史第六讲_200906

How are people to arrive at truth? ―To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment.‖ ---―Self Reliance.‖ ―God is in every man.‖ ---―Self Reliance.‖
• ―Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.‖
Walden
A Winter Walk
Assessment
• Thoreau is now regarded as both a classic American writer and a cultural hero of his country. The present opinion of his greatness stems from the power of his principal ideas and the lucid, provocative writing with which he expressed them.
To understand Emerson's aloofness from people and events, it is necessary to understand his way of thinking.
He believed that great truths come by intuition —that is, that they come unbidden. Furious striving avails nothing; truth comes gently. Most modern philosophers do not agree with Emerson; they think that truth may be reasoned. They are also interested in the working out of truth in relation to life, while Emerson was always on the alert for the first glimmer. He never finished but was always beginning, and his beginnings have been inspirations to the people of two continents.
New England Transcendentalism Emerson and Thoreau
Transcendentalism
In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed as an American version of romanticism. The movement began among an influential set of authors led by Emerson. Like romanticism, transcendentalism rejected both 18thcentury rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. Instead, the transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend the limitations of the material world. The transcendentalists found their chief source of inspiration in nature.
―The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why,‖ Thoreau asked in Walden, where his example was the answer, ―should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?‖
―Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.‖
Henry David Thoreau
1817-1862
• American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher, renowned for having lived the doctrines of Transcendentalism as recorded in his masterwork, Walden (1854), and for having been a vigorous advocate of civil liberties, as evidenced in the essay ―Civil Disobedience‖ (1849).
Works
‗Nature‘ (1836) The American Scholar (1836)
"Standing on the bare ground . . . a mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882
American lecturer, poet, and essayist, the leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism
Life
• • • • • • • • • 1803 born into a Unitarian father and an Anglican mother 1811 father died, leaving the son to his aunt 1817 entered Harvard and began his ―bank savings‖ 1829 began to preach as a Unitarian preacher 1831 married Allan Tucker, who died 2 years later 1832 resigned from the ministry, wanting his own revelation – traveled to Europe and met with Carlyle ―The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in the beholder.‖ 1833 helped launch Dial 1835 married again and settled down in Concord.
In a commercial, conservative, expedient society that was rapidly becoming urban and industrial, he upheld the right to self-culture, to an individual life shaped by inner principle. He demanded for all men the freedom to follow unique lifestyles, to make poems of their lives and living itself an art.
Life
• 1817 born into a family828 went to Concord Academy, and prepared for college • 1833 entered Harvard University • 1837 graduated and began teaching • 1838 started his own school with his brother • 1839 a canoe trip confirmed his leaving for the woods • 1840 proposed but was later rejected • 1845-47 moved to Walden Pond • 1846 put in jail for refusing to pay toll tax
Emerson‘s essay Nature (1836) was the first major document of the transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it. His other key transcendentalist works include The American Scholar (1837), a volume in which he addressed the intellectual‘s duty to culture, and 'Self-Reliance' (1841), an essay in which he asserted the importance of being true to one‘s own nature.
Transcendentalism
A sweeping revolt against the Age of Reason, against science, authority, order, and discipline.
Transcendentalism: not a fully organized movement or program, but a loose set of principles adhered to by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and others. Beliefs in the essential unity of creation, the goodness of humanity, and the supremacy of insight over logic and reason. And a renunciation of authority, whether religious, scientific, or political.