Transcendentalism in New England

When Ralph Waldo Emerson gives his "The Transcendentalist" lecture in 1842, he states that American Transcendentalists are "idealists" who were once "materialist." "Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist," as he puts it. Transcendentalists become idealists by going forward, beyond experience, "data of the senses," facts, history, "the force of circumstances," and "the animal wants of man;" yet they cannot go backward to affirm matter on its own terms. But what right is there to speculate beyond the material world if, as Emerson claims, we begin there? What of feelings and sensations; of animals, plants, and the elements; of houses, neighbors, and governments; of bodies, locomotion, and change; of climate and politics? In this course, we explore what is transcended by Transcendentalists by tracing thought backwards to its embodied, affective, and interconnected state through traversing the writings of Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman. Through a scholarly focus into the Transcendentalist movement's empirical basis, we incorporate recent theory, such as from new materialism, vitalism, animal studies, and ecological studies. In the end, this course is about what happens when we move slowly, sensitively, and attentively through the beginnings of an electrifying social, philosophical, and literary movement in American life.