LITR 4232: American Renaissance

UHCL, spring 2002

Student Research Proposal

Brenda Upton

Topic:  The American Renaissance and Transcendentalism or Transcendentalism and the impact it has on Religion, Education and Nature.

The reason I chose this topic is because the subject of Transcendentalism is an unfamiliar subject to me and I want to know more about this topic.  Listening to you during class discussion I truly believe that this is an interesting subject, but if you are unfamiliar with the subject then you are lost as a student.  So I would like to find out all I can about this topic. 

I plan to use option 2; the journal.

Using the journal format I will attempt to research, Transcendentalism and Religion, Transcendentalism and Education and Transcendentalism and Nature.  I plan to research the following author's (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau Frederick Douglass), opinion on each subject and create my journal from their aspect about each of the topics.

I will start my journal off with an introduction on What is Transcendentalism?  Then I will go further and introduce each of my authors and what is their definition of Transcendentalism.  

I have not completed all of my sources, but I do know that one of my sources will be from a web site I found that appears to be very interesting.  I will look in the Library while I am out this week and gather other sources and see what I can come up with and email you later this week. 

Please feel free to help me out with this particular topic and tell me what you think I need to do. 

Dear Brenda,

The journal sounds like a good approach for learning a lot about Transcendentalism, and I like your categories of nature, religion, and education.

I'm less certain about how you're going to work in the authors. Overall I think your research should concentrate on the broader ideas or categories of Transcendentalist impact. If you do research on those subjects as proposed, you'll likely find references explaining how particular authors fit in. But you don't need to go reading those authors yourself, because that would be more along the lines of a research / analysis paper.

More on the authors--the only one I can't see fitting is Douglass, though there are bound to be some points of resemblance. Different scholars have stretched or limited the "tent" of Transcendentalism over the years, so there's some dispute over who gets in and who gets left out, but in general it was a fairly elite group of New England writers who lived and worked fairly closely together: Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and a number of their acquaintances. You can show Whitman to have been influenced by them and to carry out some of their ideas, but it's all by extension, and with Douglass it would have to be extended further--but if you find some support for Douglass as a Transcendentalist in your research, go ahead and put it in your journal; I just haven't seen it myself.

My first move would be to go to the Oxford Companion to American Literature in the reference section of the library and read its entry on Transcendentalism. There's one source!

There's also an important book by Lawrence Buell relating Transcendentalism to the previous religious movement of Unitarianism. Nearly all the Transcendentalists were Unitarians. That book's also in the library.