LITR 4232:
American Renaissance
UHCL
spring 2006
Student Reading Presentation

1803 – 1882

Emerson has been considered by many sources to be the pivotal writer behind the American Renaissance.

 He was also one of the “first American writers to be recognized by both the British and European literary establishments.” Importantly, he did interact with the writers of his time, offering critiques and acknowledgements.

His work was held as a standard against later writers, such as Walt Whitman, Fredrick Douglass, Robert Frost, Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott.

Attended Harvard on scholarship but struggled with the academic curriculum, expecting to become either a teacher or minister.  However, just as in his youth, he supplemented his schooling with a private education of reading and journal-writing.

Began his career in the ministry but found that “dogmatic theology” unhelpful for the present.  He wrote, “My business is with the living.  I have sometimes thought that in order to be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry.”

Married Ellen Tucker in 1829, who died sixteen months later.  She left a substantial inheritance, which enabled him (through strict frugality) to travel, buy and write books.

Remarried  in 1835 to Lidian Jackson and had four children, the eldest of which would help Emerson organize his notes and lectures towards the end of his life and afterwards.

“The problem in reading Emerson—as well as the pleasure—is in seeing how such eclecticism undermines conventions of authority and reference and challenges established modes of reading.”

Objective 1 - To use critical techniques of "close reading" and "new historicism" as ways of studying classical, popular, and representative literature and cultural history of the  "American Renaissance" (the generation before the Civil War).

 Objective 2 - To study the contemporaneous movement of "Romanticism," the narrative genre of "romance," and the related styles of the "gothic" and "the sublime."

1. Are there any words that signal evidence of gothic influences?
2. Are there any words that signal evidence of sublime moments?
3. In what respect does this poem reflect Romantic ideals?

Prose - "Self Reliance"

(p. 1622, first paragraph, 4 lines down) 
     "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all me, - that is genius. ... (middle of the first paragraph) "A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within ... Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.  In every work of genius we recognize or own rejected thoughts."

(p. 1622, second paragraph)
     "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.  The power which resides in him is new in nature."

(p. 1623, third full paragraph)  
     "These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.  Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.  Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.  The virtue in most request is conformity.  Self-reliance is its aversion.  It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

1. In what respect does Emerson's writing reflect our idea of classic American literature?
2. Even though this is a non-fiction text, what evidence can be found for symbolism and description that is specifically Romantic?