Crisis and Transcendence II: The Legacy of American Transcendentalism

Harvard HDS

Part II of this yearlong course follows the Transcendentalist tradition beyond its founders, asking what it means to inherit a tradition and how a body of thought born in one crisis is transformed by the crises that follow. If the fall semester examined how Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau forged Transcendentalism in response to the upheavals of their age, the spring examines the writers who received that inheritance and improvised upon it—often radically—from the Civil War era to the present. We…