Dilemmas of American Transcendentalism

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

When European Romanticism crossed the Atlantic, it precipitated American Transcendentalism, this nation's first great literary movement. The Transcendentalists were a loose group of rebels, dreamers, and freethinkers who, inspired by both the American Revolution and the new European philosophies, set about the immodest task of remaking America - and thence, they hoped, the world. Inspired by resistance to their radical ideas, these men and women - including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Orestes Brownson, Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May Alcott -launched a daring movement to renew American religion and philosophy and create a new and genuinely American literature - and, as if that weren't enough, to reform a nation shot through with the contradictions of slavery, economic inequality, social injustice and environmental destruction. Did they succeed? Was their idealism a noble dream destroyed by the violence of the Civil War? Or did their hard work bring real progress to an American society still indebted today to this band of dreamers? That's our dilemma: both answers are correct. How are we still living the consequences of their failures, and their successes? Can their dreams still speak to us today, in our own moment - shot through as it is with so many similar contradictions?