Assignment : paper no.110 History of 20th century Literature : From 1900 to 2000

 22403 Paper no.110 History of 20th-century Literature: from 1900 to 2000

Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English, M.K.Bhavanagar University.

Vachchhalata Joshi

Vachchhalatajoshi.14@gmail.com

Roll no – 20  

Topic: Modern Age

“Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.”

 

The 20th century was like no time period before it. Einstein, Darwin, Freud and Marx were just some of the thinkers who profoundly changed Western culture. These changes took a distinct shape in the literature of the 20th century. Modernism, a movement that was a radical break from 19th century Victorianism, led to postmodernism, which emphasized self-consciousness and pop art. While 20th-century literature is a diverse field covering a variety of genres, there are common characteristics that changed literature forever.

Fragmented Structure

Prior to the 20th century, literature tended to be structured in linear, chronological order. Twentieth-century writers experimented with other kinds of structures. Virginia Woolf, for instance, wrote novels whose main plot was often "interrupted" by individual characters' memories, resulting in a disorienting experience for the reader. Ford Madox Ford's classic "The Good Soldier" plays with chronology, jumping back and forth between time periods.

 Many of these writers aimed to imitate the feeling of how time is truly experienced subjectively.

Fragmented Perspective

If there's one thing readers could count on before the 20th century, it was the reliability of an objective narrator in fiction. Modernist and postmodern writers, however, believed that this did a disservice to the reliability of stories in general. The 20th century saw the birth of the ironic narrator, who could not be trusted with the facts of the narrative. Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," for example, tells the story with a bias toward the novel's titular character. In an extreme case of fragmented perspective, Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" switches narrators between each chapter.

The Novel of the City

The 20th century is distinguished as the century of urbanism. As more people moved to cities in Europe and America, novelists used urban environments as backdrops for the stories they told. Perhaps the best known of these is James Joyce's "Dubliners," a series of short stories that all take place in various locales in Dublin. Other 20th-century writers are also closely associated with various urban centers: Woolf and London, Theodore Dreiser and Chicago, Paul Auster and New York, Michael Ondaatje and Toronto.

Writing from the Margins

The 20th century gave voice to marginalized people who previously got little recognition for their literary contributions. The Harlem Renaissance, for example, brought together African-Americans living in New York to form a powerful literary movement. Writers such as Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston wrote fiction and poetry that celebrated black identity. Similarly, female writers gained recognition through novels that chronicled their own experience. Finally, the post-colonial literary movement was born, with writers such as Chinua Achebe writing stories on behalf of subjugated peoples who had experienced colonization by Western powers.

Cubism was principally a movement in the visual arts in the early 20th century spearheaded by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. These painters explored new forms of expression by emphasizing subjective mental experience over objective sensible experience, fragmentation over linear plotting, and multiple perspectives over singular perspective. The movement influenced modernist novelists and poets of the same time period, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner, who used cubist elements in their writing to push the boundaries of literary portraiture.

 

Internal Landscape

Coming off groundbreaking advances in the social sciences, particularly the theories of Sigmund Freud, cubists were more concerned with the internal landscape of the individual than the external landscape of the objective world. Likewise, the psyche, the subconscious, the conscious intellect and creative abstraction itself all became more important in modernist literature than the more objective, one-dimensional portraiture of the Victorian period that preceded it. In “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce plumbed the internal depths of his protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, discovering a vivid and varied inner life that would come to characterize his later, more experimental novels: “His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as undersea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings."

Stream of Consciousness

The cubists’ exploration of the mind through visual arts led many writers to do the same through words and sentence structure. Whereas previous modes of writing had relied on logic and clarity to convey information, modernist writers tried to portray thought as it happened, randomly and illogically. This method became known as the “stream of consciousness.” One of the great pioneers of this method was Virginia Woolf. In her groundbreaking novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” she captured the streaming thoughts of multiple characters. For example, early in the novel, Woolf traces the random and erratic thoughts of Septimus, a war-scarred visionary on the verge of complete madness: “Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known

Multiple Perspectives

Anyone familiar with Picasso knows his paintings contained various planes and angles of perception. Modernist writers used this technique to great effect to show how narrative realities change through the subjective perspectives of different characters. A master of this technique was William Faulkner. In his novel “As I Lay Dying,” the death and burial of rural matriarch Addie Bundren is portrayed through the interlinking perspectives of more than a dozen characters. Each character has his own voice, tone and vocabulary, and relays the events of the narrative in a distinct way. Like Picasso, Faulkner created a stark collage of images revealing the subjectivity, and relativity, at the heart of the human experience.

Fragmentation of the Individual

Added together, cubist techniques presented something rather frightening: the individual as an assemblage of broken images. With the same techniques, modernist writers explored the implications of movements like cubism. If subjectivity trumped all, then how could the individual retain a rational purpose in society? How could the individual avoid alienation, loneliness, and despair, or worse, the fragmentation of insanity? In “As I Lay Dying,” Faulkner famously used a child character to show how identity is irrationally predicated on discrete, subjective percepts. Because his mother dies after he kills a fish, young Vardaman projects the identity of the former onto the latter. One chapter is composed of a single sentence: “My mother is a fish.”

 

Modern Novels

The 20th century is divided into two phases of literature--modern literature (1900-1945) and contemporary literature (1945 to the present), also referred to as postmodern. The characters in modern and contemporary novels questioned the existence of God, the supremacy of human reason, and the nature of reality. Novels from this era reflected great events such as The Great Depression, World War II, Hiroshima, the cold war, and communism. Famous modern novels include "To The Lighthouse" (1927) by English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf; "Ulysses" (1921), by Irish novelist and short story writer James Joyce; "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1929), the most famous World War I anti-war novel by German novelist and journalist Erich Maria Remarque and "The Sound and the Fury" (1929) by American novelist and short-story writer William Faulkner, which depicts the decline of the South after the Civil War.

Modern Horror

Today, many genres derive from the Gothic tradition. Stephen King and Anne Rice are both household names in Gothic fiction who use the unknown to build suspense. Their books incorporate classic horror characters such as vampires, hearkening back to Stoker's "Dracula," and serial killers, playing on the same fascination Victorians had toward the notorious "Jack the Ripper" in 19th-century England. Both vampire and horror novels have spawned their own genres, targeting all ages, including teens, through such books as Stephanie Meyers' "The Twilight Saga," and children, through R. L. Stine's "Goosebumps" series.

Individualism

In Modernist literature, the individual is more interesting than society. Specifically, modernist writers were fascinated with how the individual adapted to the changing world. In some cases, the individual triumphed over obstacles. For the most part, Modernist literature featured characters who just kept their heads above water. Writers presented the world or society as a challenge to the integrity of their characters. Ernest Hemingway is especially remembered for vivid characters who accepted their circumstances at face value and persevered.

Experimentation

Modernist writers broke free of old forms and techniques. Poets abandoned traditional rhyme schemes and wrote in free verse. Novelists defied all expectations. Writers mixed images from the past with modern languages and themes, creating a collage of styles. The inner workings of consciousness were a common subject for modernists. This preoccupation led to a form of narration called stream of consciousness, where the point of view of the novel meanders in a pattern resembling human thought. Authors James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, along with poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, are well known for their experimental Modernist works.

Absurdity

The carnage of two World Wars profoundly affected writers of the period. Several great English poets died or were wounded in WWI. At the same time, global capitalism was reorganizing society at every level. For many writers, the world was becoming a more absurd place every day. The mysteriousness of life was being lost in the rush of daily life. The senseless violence of WWII was yet more evidence that humanity had lost its way. Modernist authors depicted this absurdity in their works. Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," in which a traveling salesman is transformed into an insect-like creature, is an example of modern absurdism.

Symbolism

The Modernist writers infused objects, people, places and events with significant meanings. They imagined a reality with multiple layers, many of them hidden or in a sort of code. The idea of a poem as a riddle to be cracked had its beginnings in the Modernist period. Symbolism was not a new concept in literature, but the Modernists' particular use of symbols was an innovation. They left much more to the reader's imagination than earlier writers, leading to open-ended narratives with multiple interpretations. For example, James Joyce's "Ulysses" incorporates distinctive, open-ended symbols in each chapter.

Formalism

Writers of the Modernist period saw literature more as a craft than a flowering of creativity. They believed that poems and novels were constructed from smaller parts instead of the organic, internal process that earlier generations had described. The idea of literature as craft fed the Modernists' desire for creativity and originality. Modernist poetry often includes foreign languages, dense vocabulary and invented words. The poet e.e. cummings abandoned all structure and spread his words all across the page.

 

Assignment : Paper no. 109 Literary Theory & Criticism

 22402 Paper no.109 Literary Theory & Criticism

Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English M.K.Bhavanagar University

Vachchhalata Joshi

Vachchhalatajoshi.14@gmail.com

Roll no.20

Topic: I.A.Richards and Criticism

“A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive.”

                      “It is not surprising that the detailed analysis of metaphors, if we attempt it with such slippery terms as these, sometimes feels like extracting cube roots in the head.

 

 

Ivor Armstrong Richards   

                                

 26 February 1893 – 7 September 1979,

 Known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, and rhetorician. His work contributed to the foundations of the New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory that emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained and self-referential æsthetic object.

Richards' intellectual contributions to the establishment of the literary methodology of the New Criticism are presented in the books:

The Meaning of Meaning: (1923)

Principles of Literary Criticism (1924)

Practical Criticism (1929)

The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936).

Richards was born in Sandbach. He was educated at Clifton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where his intellectual talents were developed by the scholar Charles Hickson 'Cabby' Spence. He began his career without formal training in literature; he studied philosophy and the "moral sciences" at Cambridge University, from which derived his assertions that, in the 20th century, the literary study cannot and should not be undertaken as a specialization, in and of itself, but studied alongside a cognate field, such as philosophy, psychology or rhetoric. His early teaching appointments were as adjunct faculty: at Cambridge University, Magdalene College would not pay a salary for Richards to teach the new, and untested, academic field of English literature. Instead, like an old-style instructor, he collected weekly tuition directly from the students, as they entered the classroom.

In 1926, Richards married Dorothy Pilley whom he had met on a mountain climbing holiday in Wales.

In the 1929–30 biennium, as a visiting professor, Richards taught Basic English and Poetry at Tsinghua University, Beijing. In the 1936–38 triennium, Richards was the director of the Ornithological Institute of China. He died in Cambridge.

The life and intellectual influence of I. A. Richards approximately correspond to his intellectual interests; many endeavors were in collaboration with the linguist, philosopher, and writer Charles Kay Ogden notably in four books:

I.                   Foundations of Aesthetics (1922)

Presents the principles of aesthetic reception, the bases of the literary theory of “harmony”; aesthetic understanding derives from the balance of competing for psychological impulses. The structure of the Foundations of Aesthetics—a survey of the competing definitions of the term æsthetic—prefigures the multiple-definitions work in the books Basic Rules of Reason (1933), Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition (1932), and Coleridge on Imagination (1934)

II.                The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923)

 Presents the triadic theory of semiotics that depends upon psychological theory, and so anticipates the importance of psychology in the exercise of literary criticism. Semioticians, such as Umberto Eco, acknowledged that the methodology of the triadic theory of semiotics improved upon the methodology of the dyadic theory of semiotics presented by Ferdinand de Saussure.

III. Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (1930) describes a simplified English based upon a vocabulary of 850 words,

IV. The Times of India Guide to Basic English (1938) sought to develop Basic English as an international auxiliary language, an interlanguage.

Richards' travels, especially in China, effectively situated him as the advocate for an international program, such as Basic English. Moreover, at Harvard University, to his international pedagogy, instructor I. A. Richards began to integrate the available new media for mass communications, especially television.

Theory

Richards elaborated an approach to literary criticism in The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929) which embodied aspects of the scientific approach from his study of psychology, particularly that of Charles Scott Sherrington.

In The Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards discusses the subjects of form, value, rhythm, anesthesia an awareness of inhabiting one's body, caused by stimuli from various organs, literary infectiousness, allusiveness, divergent readings, and belief. He starts from the premise that "A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive."

Practical Criticism (1929), is an empirical study of inferior response to a literary text. As an instructor in English literature at Cambridge University, Richards tested the critical-thinking abilities of his pupils; he removed authorial and contextual information from thirteen poems and asked undergraduates to write interpretations, in order to ascertain the likely impediments to an adequate response to a literary text. That experiment in pedagogical approach – critical reading without contexts – demonstrated the variety and the depth of the possible textual misreadings that might be committed, by university students and laymen alike.

The critical method derived from that pedagogical approach did not propose a new hermeneutics, a new methodology of interpretation, but questioned the purposes and efficacy of the critical process of literary interpretation, by analyzing the self-reported critical interpretations of university students. To that end, effective critical work required a closer aesthetic interpretation of the literary text as an object.

To substantiate interpretive criticism, Richards provided theories of metaphor, value, tone, stock response, incipient action, pseudo-statement; and ambiguity. This last subject, the theory of ambiguity, was developed in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), by William Empson, a former student of Richards'; moreover, added to The Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism, Empson's book on ambiguity became the third foundational document for the methodology of the New Criticism.

To Richards, literary criticism was impressionistic, too abstract to be readily grasped and understood, by most readers; and he proposed that literary criticism could be precise in communicating meanings, by way of denotation and connotation. To establish critical precision, Richards examined the psychological processes of writing and of the reading of poetry. That in reading poetry and making sense of it "in the degree in which we can order ourselves, we need nothing more"; the reader need not believe the poetry, because the literary importance of poetry is in provoking emotions in the reader.

 

 

 

New rhetoric

As a rhetorician, Richards said that the old form of studying rhetoric the art of discourse was too concerned with the mechanics of formulating arguments and with conflict; instead, he proposed the New Rhetoric to study the meaning of the parts of discourse, as "a study of misunderstanding and its remedies" to determine how language works. That ambiguity is expected, and that meanings denotation, and connotation are not inherent to words, but are inherent to the perception of the reader, the listener, and the viewer. By their usages, compiled from experience, people decide and determine meaning by "how words are used in a sentence", in spoken and written language.

The semantic triangle

Richards and Ogden created the semantic triangle to deliver improved understanding to how words come to mean. The semantic triangle has three parts, the symbol or word, the referent, and the thought or reference. In the bottom, right corner is the Referent, the thing, in reality. Placed at the left corner is the symbol or word. At the top point, the convergence of the literal word and the object in reality; it is our intangible idea about the object. Ultimately, the English meaning of the words is determined by an individual's unique experience.

Feedforward

When the Saturday Review asked Richards to write a piece for their "What I Have Learned" series, Richards took the opportunity to expound upon his cybernetic concept of "feedforward". The Oxford English Dictionary records that Richards coined the term feedforward in 1951 at the Eighth Macy Conferences on cybernetics. In the event, the term extended the intellectual and critical influence of Richards to cybernetics which applied the term in a variety of contexts. Moreover, among Richards' students was Marshall McLuhan, who also applied and developed the term and the concept of feedforward.

According to Richards, feedforward is the concept of anticipating the effect of one's words by acting as our own critic. It is thought to work in the opposite direction of feedback, though it works essentially towards the same goal: to clarify unclear concepts. Existing in all forms of communication, feedforward acts as a pretest that any writer can use to anticipate the impact of their words on their audience. According to Richards, feedforward allows the writer to then engage with their text to make necessary changes to create a better effect. He believes that communicators who do not use feedforward will seem dogmatic. Richards wrote more in depth about the idea and importance of feedforward in communication in his book Speculative Instruments and has said that feedforward was his most important learned concept.

Influence

Richards served as mentor and teacher to other prominent critics, most notably William Empson and F. R. Leavis, although Leavis was contemporary with Richards, and Empson much younger. Other critics primarily influenced by his writings also included Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate. Later critics who refined the formalist approach to New Criticism by actively rejecting his psychological emphasis included, besides Brooks and Tate, John Crowe Ransom, W. K. Wimsatt, R. P. Blackmur, and Murray Krieger. R. S. Crane of the Chicago school was both indebted to Richards's theory and critical of its psychological assumptions. They all admitted the value of his seminal ideas but sought to salvage what they considered his most useful assumptions from the theoretical excesses they felt he brought to bear in his criticism. Like Empson, Richards proved a difficult model for the New Critics, but his model of close reading provided the basis for their interpretive methodology.

Ivor Armstrong Richards, together with Eliot, is the most influential critic in the twentieth century Anglo-American criticism. Among the moderns he is the only critic who has formulated a systematic and complete theory of the literary art. In the words of George Watson, “Richards’ claim to have pioneered Anglo-American New Criticism of the thirties and forties is unassailable. He provided the theoretical foundations on which the technique of verbal analysis was built.

As a critic, I. A. Richards is not only learned and abstract but also iconoclastic and original. He is a staunch advocate of close textual and verbal study and analysis of a work of art without reference to its author and the age. His approach is pragmatic and empirical. He is the father of psychological criticism as well as New Criticism. Such new critics as John Crowe Ransom, Kenneth Burke, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and William Empson, despite differences in their theory and practice, have repeatedly acknowledged their indebtedness to him. He has made literary criticism factual, scientific and complete. It no longer remains a matter of the application of set rules or mere intuition or impressions. He developed the unhistorical method of criticism.

He holds that adequate knowledge of psychology is essential for a literary critic to enter into the author’s mind. He also gives paramount importance to the art of communication and brings out a distinction between the scientific and the motivational uses of the language. Before coming to the value of imaginative literature he first formulates a general psychological theory of value and then applies it to literature. This is a scientific or psychological approach to literature. Poetry, according to him, represents a certain systematization in the poet, and the critic, for a proper understanding of the poem, must enter and grasp this systematization and experience of the poet. He should also be able to judge the value of different experiences, i.e., he should be able to distinguish between experiences of greater and lesser value.

“The qualities of a good critic are three,” says I. A:. Richards. “He must be adept at experiencing, without eccentricities, the state of mind relevant to the work of art he is judging. Secondly, he must be able to distinguish experiences from one another as regards their less superficial features. Thirdly, he must be a sound judge of values.” Richards himself possesses these qualities.

 

 

Assignment : Paper no 108 The American Literature

 22401 Paper no. 108: The American Literature

Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English M.K.Bhavanagar University

Vachchhalata Joshi

Roll no.20

Vachchhalatajoshi.14@gmail.com

Topic: Transcendentalism

  

 

“Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is Transcendentalism?

It’s all about spirituality. Transcendentalism is a philosophy that began in the mid-19th century and whose founding members included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It centers on the belief that spirituality cannot be achieved through reason and rationalism, but instead through self-reflection and intuition. In other words, transcendentalists believe spirituality isn’t something you can explain; it’s something you feel. A transcendentalist would argue that going for a walk in a beautiful place would be a much more spiritual experience than reading a religious text.

The transcendentalism movement arose as a result of a reaction to Unitarianism as well as the Age of Reason. Both centered on reason as the main source of knowledge, but transcendentalists rejected that notion. 

Some of the transcendentalist beliefs are:

• Humans are inherently good
• Society and its institutions such as organized religion and politics are corrupting. Instead of being part of them, humans should strive to be independent and self-reliant
• Spirituality should come from the self, not organized religion
• Insight and experience are more important than logic
• Nature is beautiful, should be deeply appreciated, and shouldn’t be altered by humans

 

 

 

 

 

Major Transcendentalist Values

The transcendentalist movement encompassed many beliefs, but these all fit into their three main values of individualism, idealism, and the divinity of nature.

Individualism

Perhaps the most important transcendentalist value was the importance of the individual. They saw the individual as pure, and they believed that society and its institutions corrupted this purity. Transcendentalists highly valued the concept of thinking for oneself and believed people were best when they were independent and could think for themselves. Only then could individuals come together and form ideal communities.

Idealism

The focus on idealism comes from Romanticism, a slightly earlier movement. Instead of valuing logic and learned knowledge as many educated people at the time did, transcendentalists placed great importance on imagination, intuition and creativity. They saw the values of the Age of Reason as controlling and confining, and they wanted to bring back a more “ideal” and enjoyable way of living.

 

Divinity of Nature

Transcendentalists didn’t believe in organized religion, but they were very spiritual. Instead of believing in the divinity of religious figures, they saw nature as sacred and divine. They believed it was crucial for humans to have a close relationship with nature, the same way religious leaders preach about the importance of having a close relationship with God. Transcendentalists saw nature as perfect as it was; humans shouldn’t try to change or improve it.

History of Transcendentalist Movement

While people had begun discussing ideas related to transcendentalism since the early 1800s, the movement itself has its origins in 1830s New England, specifically Massachusetts. Unitarianism was the major religion in the area, and it emphasized spirituality and enlightenment through logic, knowledge, and rationality. Young men studying Unitarianism who disagreed with these beliefs began to meet informally. Unitarianism was a particularly large part of life at Harvard University, where many of the first transcendentalists attended school.

In September 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson organized the first meeting of what would later be called the Transcendental Club. Together the group discussed frustrations of Unitarianism and their main beliefs, drawing on ideas from Romanticism, German philosophers, and the Hindu spiritual texts the Upanishads. The transcendentalists begin to publish writings on their beliefs, beginning with Emerson’s essay “Nature.”

 

Height

The Transcendental Club continued to meet regularly, drawing in new members, and key figures, particularly Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, published numerous essays to further spread transcendentalist beliefs. In 1840, the journal The Dial was created for transcendentalists to publish their works. Utopia communities, such as Brook Farm and Fruitlands attempted to make transcendentalism a complete lifestyle.

Decline

By the end of the 1840s, many key transcendentalists had begun to move onto other pursuits, and the movement declined. This decline was further hastened by the untimely death of Margaret Fuller, one of the leading transcendentalists and cofounder of The Dial. While there was a smaller second wave of transcendentalism during this time, the brief resurgence couldn’t bring back the popularity the movement had enjoyed the previous decade, and transcendentalism gradually faded from public discourse, although people still certainly share the movement’s beliefs. Even recently, movies such as The Dead Poets Society and The Lion King express transcendentalist beliefs such as the importance of independent thinking, self-reliance, and enjoying the moment.

 

 

 

 

Figures in the Transcendentalist Movement

At its height, many people supported the beliefs of transcendentalism, and numerous well-known names from the 19th century have been associated with the movement. Below are five key transcendentalists.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson is the key figure in transcendentalism. He brought together many of the original transcendentalists, and his writings form the foundation of many of the movement’s beliefs. The day before he published his essay “Nature” he invited a group of his friends to join the “Transcendental Club” a meeting of like-minded individuals to discuss their beliefs. He continued to host club meetings, write essays, and give speeches to promote transcendentalism. Some of his most important transcendentalist essays include “The Over-Soul,” “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar” and “Divinity School Address.”

 

Henry David Thoreau

The second-most important transcendentalist, Thoreau was a friend of Emerson’s who is best known for his book Walden. Walden is focused on the benefits of individualism, simple living and close contact with and observation of nature. Thoreau also frequently opposed the government and its actions, most notably in his essay “Civil Disobedience.”

Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was perhaps the leading female transcendentalist. A well-known journalist and ardent supporter of women’s rights, she helped cofound The Dial, the key transcendentalist journal, with Emerson, which helped cement her place in the movement and spread the ideas of transcendentalism to a wider audience. An essay she wrote for the journal was later published as the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, one of the earliest feminist works in the United States. She believed in  the importance of the individual, but often felt that other transcendentalists, namely Emerson, focused too much on individualism at the expense of social reform.

 

Amos Bronson Alcott

A friend of Emerson’s, Alcott (father of Little Women’s Louisa May Alcott), was an educator known for his innovative ways of teaching and correcting students. He wrote numerous pieces on transcendentalism, but the quality of his writing was such that most were unpublishable. A noted abolitionist, he refused to pay his poll tax to protest President Tyler’s annexation of Texas as a slave territory. This incident inspired Thoreau to do a similar protest, which led to him writing the essay “Civil Disobedience.”

Frederic Henry Hedge

Frederic Henry Hedge met Emerson when both were students at Harvard Divinity School. Hedge was studying to become a Unitarian minister, and he had already spent several years studying music and literature in Germany. Emerson invited him to join the first meeting of the Transcendental Club (originally called Hedge’s Club, after him), and he attended meetings for several years. He wrote some of the earliest pieces later categorized as Transcendentalist works, but he later became somewhat alienated from the group and refused to write pieces for The Dial.

 

George Ripley

Like Hedge, Ripley was also a Unitarian minister and founding member of the Transcendental Club. He founded the Utopian community Brook Farm based on major Transcendentalist beliefs. Brook Farm residents would work the farm (whichever jobs they found most appealing) and use their leisure time to pursue activities they enjoyed, such as dancing, music, games, and reading. However, the farm was never able to do well financially, and the experiment ended after just a few years.

Criticisms over Transcendentalism

From its start, transcendentalism attracted numerous critics for its nontraditional, and sometimes outright alien, ideas. Many transcendentalists were seen as outcasts, and many journals refused to publish works written by them. Below are some of the most common criticisms.

 

Spirituality over Organized Religion

For most people, the most shocking aspect of transcendentalism was that it promoted individual spirituality over churches and other aspects of organized religion. Religion was the cornerstone of many people’s lives at this time, and any movement that told them it was corrupting and to give it up would have been unfathomable to many.

Over-Reliance on Independence

Many people, even some transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller, felt that transcendentalism at times ignored the importance of community bonds and over-emphasized the need to rely on no one but one’s self, to the point of irresponsibility and destructiveness. Some people believe that Herman Melville’s book Moby Dick was written as a critique of complete reliance on independence. In the novel, the character Ahab eschews nearly all bonds of camaraderie and is focused solely on his goal of destroying the white whale. This eventually leads to his death. Margaret Fuller also felt that transcendentalism could be more supportive of community initiatives to better the lives of others, such as by advocating for women’s and children’s rights.

 

Abstract Values

Have a hard time understanding what transcendentalists really wanted?

 So did a lot of people, and it made them view the movement as nothing more than a bunch of dreamers who enjoyed criticizing traditional values but weren’t sure what they themselves wanted. Edgar Allen Poe accused the movement of promoting “obscurity for obscurity's sake.”

 

Unrealistic Utopian Ideals

Some people viewed the transcendentalists’ focus on enjoying life and maximizing their leisure time as hopelessly naive and idealistic. Criticism frequently focused on the Utopian communities some transcendentalists created to promote communal living and the balance of work and labor. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who stayed at the Brook Farm communal living experiment, disliked his experience so much that he wrote an entire novel, The Blithedale Romance, criticizing the concept and transcendentalist beliefs in general.

 

Major Transcendentalist Works

Many transcendentalists were prolific writers, and examples abound of transcendentalism quotes, essays, books, and more. Below are four examples of transcendentalist works, as well as which of the transcendentalist beliefs they support.

 

“Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson wrote this essay in 1841 to share his views on the issue of, you guessed it, self-reliance. Throughout the essay he discusses the importance of individuality and how people must avoid the temptation to conform to society at the expense of their true selves. It also contains the excellent line “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

There are three main ways Emerson says people should practice self-reliance is through non-conformity (“A man must consider what a blindman's-bluff is this game of conformity”), solitude over society (“the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”), and spirituality that is found in one’s own self (“The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps”). Self-reliance and an emphasis on the individual over community is a core belief of transcendentalism, and this essay was key in developing that view.

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Published in 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass included 12 untitled poems. Whitman was a fan of Emerson’s and was thrilled when the latter highly praised his work. The poems contain many transcendentalism beliefs, including an appreciation of nature, individualism, and spirituality.

A key example is the poem later titled “Song of Myself” which begins with the line “I celebrate myself” and goes on to extoll the benefits of the individual “Welcome is every organ and attribute of me”, the enjoyment of nature (“The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark colored sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn”), the goodness of humans (“You shall possess the good of the earth and sun”), and the connections all humans share (“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”).

 

“The Summer Rain” by Henry David Thoreau

This transcendentalism poem, like many of Thoreau’s works, focuses on the beauty and simplicity of nature. Published in 1849, the poem describes the narrator’s delight at being in a meadow during a rainstorm.

The poem frequently mentions the enjoyment that observing nature can bring, and there are many descriptions of the meadow such as, “A clover tuft is pillow for my head/And violets quite overtop my shoes.” But Thoreau also makes a point to show that he believes nature is more enjoyable and a better place to learn from than intellectual pursuits like reading and studying. He begins the poem with this verse: “My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read/'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large/Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,/And will not mind to hit their proper targe” and continues later on with “Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,/What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,/If juster battles are enacted now/Between the ants upon this hummock’s crown?”

He makes clear that he is comparing works of Shakespeare and Homer to the joys of nature, and he finds nature the better and more enjoyable way to learn. This is in line with Transcendentalist beliefs that insight and experience are more rewarding than book learning.

 

“What Is Beauty?” by Lydia Maria Child

Lydia Maria Child, a women’s rights activist and abolitionist, wrote this essay, which was published in The Dial in 1843. The essay discusses what constitutes beauty and how we can appreciate beauty.

It frequently references the transcendentalist theme that intuition and insight are more important than knowledge for understanding when something is beautiful, such as in the line “Beauty is felt, not seen by the understanding.” All the knowledge in the world can’t explain why we see certain things as beautiful; we simply know that they are.

 

Summary: Transcendentalism Definition

What’s a good transcendentalism definition? Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement centered on spirituality that was popular in the mid-19th century. Key transcendentalism beliefs were that humans are inherently good but can be corrupted by society and institutions, insight and experience and more important than logic, spirituality should come from the self, not organized religion, and nature is beautiful and should be respected.

The transcendentalist movement reached its height in the 1830s and 1840s and included many well-known people, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Transcendentalists wrote widely, and by reading their works you can get a better sense of the movement and its core beliefs.