|
LITR 4328: American Renaissance .png){kind=small} |
Model
Assignments |
 |
Ruth Brown
12 December 2018
Transcending
Common Knowledge
This class continually offered me the opportunity to expand my knowledge beyond
the basics of what I possessed upon entering the class. I had a vague idea of
writers and works that we would be studying in American Renaissance and I
thought I knew about romantic style. However, every week it felt like I was
having my eyes opened to new terms and ideas and I kept coming across writers
that I had never studied or sometimes even heard of. In my midterm essay, I was
able to explore the ideas of gothic and sublime and how those interacted with
the romantic style. Besides those two concepts, the most important idea I’ve
connected with the American Renaissance is transcendentalism. This idea not only
came up in a lot of the work we read, but while writing my research report I
learned that all five writers I was focusing on were involved in the
transcendental movement. This offered me a more in depth look at what I think is
one of the most important themes of the American Renaissance.
From what I’ve learned through the course’s
terms page, transcendentalism grew from the religious movement Unitarianism,
which grew from Puritanism. However, it is more than just a religious movement.
It is committed to higher thoughts, higher laws, and to the importance of an
individual’s soul. There is an emphasis on nature and a de-emphasis on
government and collective movements.
While I was able to research significant writers of the transcendentalist
movement, it was still a little abstract until I took that knowledge and
reviewed over the texts that we had studied. I was able to better understand
transcendental ideas when I reviewed over Emerson’s
Nature. Clearly, nature is a prominent theme and throughout the work is
the idea that nature is for every man and no one can own it. Emerson also writes
about nature blended with spirituality. He says, “Nature is not fixed but fluid.
Spirit alters, moulds, makes it.” It is an ever changing environment and there
is a purity to it and a wholeness. The idea of healing, strength, and
restoration from nature is also a transcendental theme that is found throughout
this work.
Transcendentalism is not all about nature or the spirit though. In Thoreau’s
"Civil Disobedience” one is able to see the
strong theme of individualism emerge and how the individual should interact with
government. Thoreau begins with the strong statement, "That government is best
which governs not at all.” Thoreau argues that the government does not offer
freedom and it does not always do the right things. One should be governed by
their character and conscience, whereas the government is concerned only with
physical strength and majority rule. Thoreau brings nature back in when he
describes society as a machine, but suggests that humans should be like seeds
that fall from trees and “obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish
as best they can.” Thoreau reminds people that it is up to the individual to
follow a higher law than just the law of man.
When I first began learning about transcendentalism, I thought it was just about
nature and that it was a passive philosophical idea. While nature is a core
standard in transcendentalism, it is about so much more and it is very active.
Emerson taught me that I can change my world and perception, and as he says in
Nature “Build,
therefore, your own world.” Emerson also taught me that it doesn’t matter what
my situation is, I can choose to cherish and appreciate what I have in front of
me. Thoreau too taught me that action is required, not to be a member of society
and government, but to stay faithful to my conscience and to not turn off my
critical thinking. In the end, transcendentalism really taught me about choice,
about the individual, and about following a high law, whether it be nature,
conscience, or God.
