Transcendentalism
• Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Philosophical Romanticism
• A reliance on intuition and conscience
Transcendentalism, though based on doctrines of ancient and modern European philosophers,
took on special significance in the United States.
The group seemed in general harmony in their conviction that within the nature of human
beings there was something which transcended human experience - an intuitive and personal
revelation.
They believed in living close to nature and taught the dignity of manual labor. They strongly
believed the need of intellectual companionships and interests, and placed great emphasis
on spiritual living. Every person’s relationship to God was a personal matter and was to be
established directly by the individual.
They held firmly that human beings were divine in their own right. Opposed to the Puritan
doctrines of grace
Self-trust and self-reliance were to be practiced at all times and on all occasions.
Believed firmly in democracy, and insisted on intense individualism
Early advocates for the enfranchisement of women
Were by nature reformers
Went so far, as to evolve a system of dietetics and to rule out coffee, wine and tobacco.
Most of the transcendentalists were by nature reformers
In this way, most of the reforms were attempts to awaken and regenerate the human spirit.
It was the belief that human beings can intuitively transcend the limits of the senses and of
logic and receive directly higher truths and greater knowledge denied to other mundane
methods of knowing.
Thoreau and Emerson were the fathers of transcendentalist philosophy but the movement
spawned many others and Hawthorn was a part of the movement when they founded a
commune called Brooks farm
American Romanticism stems from the English Romantic poets, such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats,
Shelley, Byron, and Blake.
The major themes of American Romanticism are:
Vs Puritanism
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intuition is more valid than reason
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reason was used according
the the Bible
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experience is more important than universal
principles
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Experience means nothing
Only the word of God and the
church had universal meaning
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man is at the center of the universe and God is
the center of man
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God is the center of all life
and man finds God in church
and in worship
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man should seek harmony with nature where
the supernatural can be sensed
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Nature was the habitat of the
devil, it was unknown and
therefore dangerous
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we should strive for idealism by changing the
world into what it should be, rather than what
it is passion, beauty, emotion are revered
Celebration of individual
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we should accept the world
as it is and understand that
we are predestined. Thee is
no free will so we should
adjust our world to meet the
will of Go.
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Man's ability to find a personal God or
spiritual meaning
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God is absolute,
unchanging and angry
at you for sinning.
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Questioning of authority -emphasis
placed on developing personal values
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Follow authority
which is based on the
church.
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Imagination and creativity praised
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No creativity or
imagination, those
are the world of the
devil.
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Individual choice for good or evil rather
than a predestined future
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We can not choose,
God has chosen out
fate.
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sensibility; primitivism; love of nature;
sympathetic interest in the past,
especially the medieval; mysticism;
individualism; and a reaction against
whatever characterized neoclassicism
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The society is Society
is paramount and
more important than
the individual.
Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and the
Transcendentalists represent the first great literary generation produced in the United States. In the
case of the novelists, the Romantic vision tended to express itself in the form Hawthorne called the
"Romance," a heightened, emotional, and symbolic form of the novel. Romances were not love stories,
but serious novels that used special techniques to communicate complex and subtle meanings.
Romantic Period in American Literature. Help students understand Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson,
and Thoreau.
Romanticism in American Literature brought us some of the world's greatest writers. Edgar Allan
Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving and
Henry David Thoreau are still studied in classrooms throughout America and in Europe. Help
students understand the context in which they wrote with this convenient one page handout.
Romanticism
Romance describes strange lands and wonderful adventures. It allows the writer greater latitude
to include the marvelous with the real. The romance may include the traditional hero with white
hat on the white horse; the evil villain with the long black mustache; the lovely young woman in
need of rescue, and the hairbreadth rescue itself. Romanticism as a movement began in the
late 18th century, moved to England where it developed an emphasis in the glorification of
nature, the supernatural, and the rebel—the individual against society. It spread to America in
the early to mid 19th century and is represented in such writers as Hawthorne, Poe, and
Cooper.
American Romanticism
In the 1830’s, America began to experience the impact of the Romantic Movement that was
transforming European civilization. Like the European movement of which it was an offshoot,
American Romanticism was in a broad sense a new attitude toward nature, humanity, and
society that espoused individualism and freedom. Many trends characterized American
Romanticism. Among the most important are the following:
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An impulse toward reform (temperance, women’s rights, abolition of slavery)
A celebration of individualism (Emerson, Thoreau)
A reverence for nature (Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau)
A concern with the impact of new technology (locomotive)
An idealization of women
A fascination with death and the supernatural (Hawthorne, Poe)
Important Writers
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Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882): Self-Reliance
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): Walden, Civil Disobedience
Washington Irving (1783-1859): The Devil and Tom Walker, Rip Van Winkle Tales
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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849): The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red
Death, The Raven and many many more
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables,
Doctor Heidegger’s Experiment, Young Goodman Brown
Read more: http://www.brighthub.com/education/k12/articles/6429.aspx#ixzz1KYBS4puW
Read more: http://www.brighthub.com/education/k12/articles/29449.aspx#ixzz1KYBG3sO8Naturalism is best exemplified in the following
poem by Stephen Crane:
A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
Naturalism is a literary movement in the late 19th and early 20th century, characterized
by the application of scientifuc determinism to literature. The assumption with naturalism
is that everything that is real exists in nature. Realism and Naturalism are often linked
due to its emphasis on realistic people in realistic settings, featuring ordinary people
struggling against unseen forces over which they have no control. Realism and
Naturalism differ insomuch that Realism focuses on literary technique whereas
Naturalism focuses on a specific philosophy. Naturalist writers include:
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Stephen Crane
Jack London
John Steinbeck
John Dos Passos
Theodore Dreisser
George Eliot
Thomas Hardy
Edith Wharton
Joel Chandler Harris
Naturalism Notes
Discuss the following. Taking notes is effective. Cornell notes work well.
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The naturalistic view of humans is that they respond to the natural world much like
animals, reacting to natural forces they neither understand nor control.
Naturalism embraces sociological and economic determinism.
Human beings are often portrayed as victims of destiny or fate.
Naturalistic writers portray nature as indifferent.
Naturalists strive for objectivity.
Naturalists are pessimistic about human capabilities.
Life is a trap.
Naturalists portray humans as animalistic, driven by fear, hunger, and sex.
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After hearing the same 13 excuses for nearly an entire year, I decided to introduce
Naturalism as follows:
1. Ask if any student at any point in the semester didn't do a homework assignment.
Ninety-eight percent will raise their hand.
2. Assign each student to write a one page note excusing their missing assignment.
The excuse must clearly show that the missing homework assignment was not
their fault and that circumstances beyond their control caused the assignment not
to be turned in.
3. Collect the excuses and tell the class they have experienced Naturalism in
Literature.
4. Tell the class that each student who completed the assignment will have their
zero replaced by an 'A'.
5. On the way to your desk, trip and "accidentally" throw the papers in a trash can.
6. Explain that due to circumstances beyond your control the zeroes will remain.
7. Tell the class they have once again experienced Naturalism in Literature.
8. Laugh really hard.
9. Discuss the following notes.
10. Tell your colleagues what you did.
11. Laugh Really Hard.
12. Park in your garage.
Related Guides:
American Romanticism
Read more: http://www.brighthub.com/education/k12/articles/29449.aspx#ixzz1KYB10PI0What is Modernism?
Don't confuse Modernism in Literature or the Modernists movement with the standard
dictionary definition of modern. Modernism in Literature is not a chronological
designation. Modernism in Literature consists of literary work possessing certain loosely
defined characteristics. The following characteristics of Modernism answer the question
what is Modernism?
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Modernism is marked by a strong and intentional break with tradition. This break
includes a strong reaction against established religious, political, and social views.
Modernists believe the world is created in the act of perceiving it; that is, the world is
what we say it is.
Modernists do not subscribe to absolute truth. All things are relative.
Modernists feel no connection with history or institutions. Their experience is that of
alienation, loss, and despair.
Modernists champion the individual and celebrate inner strength.
Modernists believe life is unordered.
Modernists concern themselves with the sub-conscious.
British Modernism
The horrors of World War I (1914-19), with its accompanying atrocities and
senselessness became the catalyst for the Modernist movement in literature and art.
Modernist authors felt betrayed by the war, believing the institutions in which they were
taught to believe had led the civilized world into a bloody conflict. They no longer
considered these institutions as reliable means to access the meaning of life, and
therefore turned within themselves to discover the answers.
Their antipathy towards traditional institutions found its way into their writing, not just in
content, but in form. Popular English Modernists include the following:
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James Joyce - His most experimental and famous work, Ulysses, completely abandons
generally accepted notions of plot, setting, and characters.
Ford Madox Ford - The Good Soldier examines the negative effect of war.
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse, as well, strays from conventional forms, focusing on
Stream of Consciousness.
Stevie Smith - Novel on Yellow Paper parodies conventionality.
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World protests against the dangers and nature of modern
society.
D.H. Lawrence - His novels reflected on the dehumanizing effect of modern society.
T.S. Eliot - Although American, Eliot's The Wasteland is associated with London and
emphasizes the emptiness of Industrialism.
American Modernism
Known as "The Lost Generation" American writers of the 1920s
Brought Modernism to the United States. For writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald,
World War I destroyed the illusion that acting virtuously brought about good. Like their
British contemporaries, American Modernists rejected traditional institutions and forms.
American Modernists include:
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Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises chronicles the meaningless lives of the Lost
Generation. Farewell to Arms narrates the tale of an ambulance driver searching for
meaning in WWI.
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby shows through its protagonist, Jay Gatsby, the
corruption of the American Dream.
John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, and Sherwood Anderson are other prominent writers of
the period.
Read more: http://www.brighthub.com/education/k-12/articles/29453.aspx#ixzz1KYAjUias
Post Modern The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–
World War II literature (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable
narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.
Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little
agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature.
However, unifying features often coincide with Jean-François Lyotard's concept of the
"metanarrative" and "little narrative", Jacques Derrida's concept of "play", and Jean Baudrillard's
"simulacra." For example, instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the
postmodern author eschews, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern
novel is often a parody of this quest.
This distrust of totalizing mechanisms extends even to the author and his own self-awareness;
thus postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction to undermine
the author's "univocation" (the existence of narrative primacy within a text, the presence of a
single all-powerful storytelling authority). The distinction between high and low culture is also
attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of multiple cultural elements
including subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature. Both modern and
postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism, in which a story was told from
an objective or omniscient point of view. In character development, both modern and postmodern
literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of
consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the stream of consciousness styles of
Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore
fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction…
Unlike postmodern literature, however, modernist literature saw fragmentation and extreme
subjectivity as an existential crisis or a Freudian internal conflict. In postmodern literature this crisis
is avoided. The tortured, isolated anti-heroes of, say, Knut Hamsun or Samuel Beckett, and the
nightmare world of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, make way in postmodern writing for the selfconsciously deconstructed and self-reflexive narrators of novels by Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir
Sorokin, John Fowles, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, or Julian Barnes.
‘Postmodernism’ is a broad range of
1. responses to modernism, especially refusals of some of its totalizing premises and
effects, and of its implicit or explicit distinction between ‘high’ culture and
commonly lived life,
2. responses to such things as a world lived under nuclear threat and threat to the
geosphere, to a world of faster communication, mass mediated reality, greater
diversity of cultures and mores and a consequent pluralism,
3. acknowledgments of and in some senses struggles against a world in which, under a
spreading technological capitalism, all things are are commodified and fetishized
(made the object of desire), and in which genuine experience has been replaced by
simulation and spectacle,
4. resultant senses of fragmentation, of discontinuity, of reality as a pastiche rather than
as a weave,
5. reconceptualizations of society, history and the self as cultural constructs, hence as
rhetorical constructs.
There are ‘postmodernisms’ even more than there were ‘modernisms’, and not all postmodernism
partakes of all of the following attributes:
a reaction to, refusal and diffusion of, the elements of modernist thought which are totalizing:
which suggest a master narrative or master code, i.e. an explanatory cohesion of experience; the
result may be
1. a sense of discontinuity, of the world as a field of contesting explanations none of
which can claim any authority,
2. parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and master-code elements, including genre and
literary form,
3. the challenging of borders and limits, including those of decency,
4. the exploration of the marginalized aspects of life and marginalized elements of
society.
(The ‘problem’ with grand narratives is that they bring all of experience under one
explanatory and one implicitly or explicitly regulative order, and hence are potentially
(some would say, inevitably) totalitarian and repressive; the problem of trying to live
without them is that without their explanatory frame there is no way in which acts
can be validated (once one tries, one uncovers a hidden grand narrative) other than
through the validation of pleasure or pain, some would say beauty or ugliness. It
comes down to what one believes: is living without grand narratives an act of
courage and freedom in the face of inevitable doubt and instability, or merely an
opening of oneself to the worst forces of the libido and an abandonment of
necessary principles?)
a sense that life is lived in a world with no transcendent warrant, nothing to guarantee or to
underwrite our being as meaningful moral creatures. Life just is. We no longer look for a pattern. We
live between the 1’s and the 0’s, in the interstices of meaning; we live on the bleak terrain of an
endless uncreated happenstance universe. We may celebrate its specificity, its immediacy; or not.
Postmodernism goes different directions here.
the writing of reflexive or meta-fiction: fiction which is in the first instance aware of itself as
fiction and which may dramatize the false or constructed nature of fiction, on the one hand, or the
inevitable fictionality of all experience, on the other.
Self-referential, tongue-in-cheek, rehashes of classic pop culture Flattening of Affect Technology,
violence, drugs, and the media lead to detached, emotionless, unauthentic lives Hyperreality
Technologically created realities are often more authentic or desirable than the real world Time Bending
Time travel provides another way to shape reality and play "what if" games with society Altered States
Drugs, mental illness and technology provide a dark, often psychedelic, gateway to new internal realities
More Human than Human Artificial intelligence, robotics, and cybernetics seek to enhance, or replace,
humanity
Pulp Fiction - Quirky tribute to old Hollywood crime dramas and "Pulp" magazines, filled with numerous
pop culture references
Jackie Brown - Tarantino's spin on "blaxploitation" action flicks of the 1970's that manages to reinvent
Pam Grier and her co-stars
Kill Bill, Volume 1 - Stylized fusion and tribute of Hong Kong action flicks and spaghetti Westerns, filled
with exaggerated stereotypes
Scream - A postmodern slasher movie, where the killer and his victims knowingly play out the clich?d
plots of classic horror films
Scary Movie - Low brow, third order simulacra is a pastiche of other pastiches (Scream and I Know What
You Did Last Summer)
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark - Campy cult comedy that follows a vampire TV hostess as fate brings her to
suburbia
Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Tongue-in-cheek horror/comedy that follows a suburban high school student
and vampire hunter
This is Spinal Tap - Mockumentary about a fictitious British band on their American comeback tour
Austin Powers - Mock Bond film pays homage to the popular culture of the Swinging 60's, British
Invasion, and ridiculous Spy flicks
Postmodern Movies by Category
Pastiche
Pulp Fiction - Quirky tribute to old Hollywood crime dramas and "Pulp" magazines, filled with
numerous pop culture references
Jackie Brown - Tarantino's spin on "blaxploitation" action flicks of the 1970's that manages to
reinvent Pam Grier and her co-stars
Kill Bill, Volume 1 - Stylized fusion and tribute of Hong Kong action flicks and spaghetti
Westerns, filled with exaggerated stereotypes
Scream - A postmodern slasher movie, where the killer and his victims knowingly play out the
clich?d plots of classic horror films
Scary Movie - Low brow, third order simulacra is a pastiche of other pastiches (Scream and I
Know What You Did Last Summer)
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark - Campy cult comedy that follows a vampire TV hostess as fate
brings her to suburbia
Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Tongue-in-cheek horror/comedy that follows a suburban high school
student and vampire hunter
This is Spinal Tap - Mockumentary about a fictitious British band on their American comeback
tour
Austin Powers - Mock Bond film pays homage to the popular culture of the Swinging 60's,
British Invasion, and ridiculous Spy flicks
Flattening of Affect
2001 - A Space Odyssey - Sci-Fi space tale where the ship's computer (HAL) shows more
emotion than the machine-like human crew
Natural Born Killers - Victims of traumatized childhoods become serial killers glorified by the
mass media
A Clockwork Orange - A dystopian examination of ultra-violence, social conditioning, free will,
and post-industrial alienation
American Psycho - A look at our culture's desensitization to violence via a Wall Street
professional and cold blooded killer
Rules of Attraction - A modern love triangle between numbed, self-absorbed, over-priviledged
students at a fictional New England college
Less Than Zero - A rich college student in the 80's binges on sex, drugs, and alcohol and goes
from having it all to having nothing
The Stepford Wives - Postmodern-feminist tale where the dull subservient lives of suburban