American Transcendentalism
Movements/Periods of Art, Architecture,
Music, Literature, Philosophy,
• Classicism (8th century BCE-fall of
Rome 5th century: Plato, Homer, etc.)
• Medievalism (“middle ages” 5th
century-15th century: Dante, Chaucer)
• Renaissance (“Elizabethan” 15th-
• Realism/Naturalism (1860-1914:
Flaubert, London, Sinclair)
– Social Realism
– Magical Realism
– Psychological Realism
mid17th century: Shakespeare, Queen
Elizabeth)
• Modernism (1914-1945: Yeats,
• Neo-Classicism (“Enlightenment”
• Post-Modernism (1945-1990?:
mid-17th-1830: Voltaire, Pope, Hobbes)
• Romanticism (1785-1860:
Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe)
• Victorianism (1830-1901: Queen
Victoria, Tennyson, Brownings)
Lawrence, Faulkner, Pound, Eliot)
Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault)
• Post-Post-Modernism (1990-?
Crash, Magnolia)
What is a “period” or “movement”?
• A way of categorizing/organizing art, literature, and ideas—a label.
• Kind of like a “frame” placed around a group of ideas and works
and that seem to directly shape and reflect the particular
circumstances of a time period.
• Assumes every age has its characteristic features (political,
architectural, philosophical, aesthetic, cultural, economic, social,
sexual, moral, etc.) which are reflected in representative artifacts or
creations.
• Assumes also that understanding the special features of the time
enhances/clarifies/completes one’s understanding of the artifacts
(and that an understanding of the artifacts
enhances/clarifies/completes one’s understanding of the time).
Think “classic rock”
• When was it? Who created it? When did it become “classic?”
• Features?
• Did it shape and reflect the political, cultural, philosophical, economic
ideas of the time? What must one understand about the times to fully
appreciate “classic rock?”
• No strict conformity; diversity (Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Beatles, and Pink
Floyd are all in the “classic” canon), but a distinctness, nonetheless.
• Think, too, about changes in the artists. “Come Together” is “classic.”
Is “8 Days a Week?”
• Is Van Halen “classic?”
• Is “classic rock” over?
A Period/Movement is…
• Less like a precise yardstick • And more like a wave on a
that cleanly delineates the
beach that gathers up the
distinct beginning and end of
receding wave that came before
an era
and mixes it all together.
What Came Before
“Age of Enlightenment”
– Galileo (Italy) and Kepler
(Germany): Heliocentrism
– Isaac Newton (England): Laws of
motion and gravity.
– Francis Bacon (England):
Knowledge emanates not from Church
or books, but from observation and
generalization (empiricism).
– Rene Descartes (France): the only
thing we really know is that we think
(“I think; therefore, I am”); therefore,
reason (not faith) is the building block
for knowledge.
• Reason and logic good;
emotion and “enthusiasm”
bad.
• The universe is orderly,
precise, and predictable;
society should be, too.
Movements develop in response to what
came before
• Puritanism addressed
• Enlightenment addressed
• Corruption in the church.
• Superstition.
• Too much power in church • Power of church in civic
hierarchy.
affairs.
• Distant God.
• Arbitrary God.
• Fears of uncertainty
• Fears of uncertainty.
What kinds of challenges and/or problems might the
Enlightenment have presented to people?
• Life becomes mechanical.
• “Inspir” ation
• Application of
enlightenment principles:
Industrialization.
• Urban development:
life moves by the
factory whistle and not
the church bell.
• Devaluing of individual
perception and intuition.
• Disconnect between
knowledge and everyday experience.
How do you reclaim “the spiritual” knowing
what you know about the power of reason and
empiricism to reveal truth?
Start with the idea that there’s
more than just what’s “out there.”
And humans are more than just
“tabla rasa” with reason that
processes experience.
The mind is divine.
Need a revolution in/of the
human consciousness—a casting
off of the “mind-forg’d
manacles” (Blake) of imprisoning
orthodoxies, traditions, and
hierarchies.
• People are inherently good; society corrupts them (contrast with the
belief that people are inherently corrupt and the belief that an ordered
society produces good people).
Children, the “uncultivated,” and
“primitive” people are especially
interesting because they are relatively
“unspoiled” by society’s influence.
• The individual and his/her “subjective” experience is far more
valuable than the group and its shared “objective” facts.
• Emotions and impulses are the
most “natural” of human
manifestations and since that
which is human is good,
emotions are really good.
Poetry becomes “the
spontaneous overflow of
emotion recollected in
tranquility” (Wordsworth).
• In fact, an individual can be
uplifted morally and spiritually
by cultivating a greater
sensitivity to feeling (e.g.
empathy could be a seed for
social change).
• Reason…not so good. “Deep
thinking is attainable only by a
man of deep feeling.”
(Coleridge)
• Mysticism, dreams/nightmares,
the supernatural, and
psychological extremes, instead
(Confessions of an Opium Eater
by Thomas De Quincey). The
addition of “strangeness to
beauty.”
• Nature is the antithesis of
civilization and is good.
Nature rambles allow for quiet
meditation, perfect opportunity
to “find oneself.”
• The “common man” and his
speech are cool. Glorification
of the ordinary and humble.
• Heroism becomes the
individual pursuit of the
unattainable: “Less than
everything cannot satisfy
man.” (Blake). The “desire of
the moth for a star.” (Shelley)
What does Walden and “Economy” appear to be?
• Necessity/luxury
• Clothing?
• When does “enough”
become “too much” and
“not enough”?
• Why work?
• Food?
• Shelter?
• The wise man….but the
fool…..
• Freedom/slavery
• Heat?
I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but
to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning,
standing on his roost, if only to wake my
neighbors up.
• What’s he “crowing” about?
• Who’s he trying to “wake up?” From what
kind of sleep?
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
• Desperate for what?
• Why quietly?
• True?
The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably
warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they
are cooked, of course a al mode….
When a man is warmed by the several modes which I
have described, what does he want next? Surely not
more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer
food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more
abundant clothing, more numerous incessant and
hotter fires, and the like. (1879)
• Unnaturally hot? Cooked?
• And why a la mode?
• I say, beware of all enterprises that require new
clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
(1884)
• Men have become the tools of their tools
(1891).
• Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which
distract our attention from serious things
(1899)….Our life is frittered away by detail
(1920).
• As for work, we haven’t any of consequence
(1921).
• The gross feeder is a man in the larva state
(1984).
• Higher laws? Higher than what?
• What did he live for?