What Was American Transcendentalism?

The transcendentalists can be described in a word: firebrands. From civil disobedience to heresy, from abolitionism to utopianism, this course explores how transcendentalism takes root in New England to generate some of the most radical experiments in Antebellum America life. However, regardless of transcendentalism's fame, or how illustrious its members, or how canonical its texts, we have no satisfactory way to define the movement or its achievements. What does it even mean to transcend? Transcend what and to where? In this course, we attempt to figure out what transcendentalism is and why it matters by traversing its theological, historical, and literary contexts. Tracing (or perhaps dissolving) the boundary between human, world, and god, we investigate how intellectual and social revolution happens without distinguishing poetry from science, religion from politics, accident from fate, and perhaps even transcendence from immanence. We ask, among other questions, what are our obligations to ourselves and our neighbors or to animals and plants? Are we bound to respect what violates our conscience? How do we embrace both individualism and collectivism? All said, what do the transcendentalists teach us about rights and responsibilities in our own time?