This week

IV. Literature of the American Renaissance (1837-1865)

• Alexis de Tocqueville

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Henry David Thoreau

IV: Lit of the American Renaissance (1837-1865)

• Jacksonian America

election of Andrew Jackson (1828)

era of common man

second Great Awakening

(spread of democractic impulse)

(direct relationship to God)

Washington & Adams

Jefferson & Madison

Monroe & J.Q. Adams

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson

• Born in a log cabin• War hero• Campaigned as a

common man• 1st president not from

Virginia or Mass.

Alexis de Tocqueville

• Democracy in America

-toured US in 1830s

-looked at US democracy in light of French Revolution

-observations still hold!

De Tocqueville’s observations

• Equality (in family & public life)

• Role of men & women

• Black question

• Newspapers chaotic but positive

• Role of religion

• Love of money

• Forming of organizations/clubs

Reason for joining

• Lack of social institutions

• Loneliness

• Searching for way to measure selves

• Orient selves based on neighbors

• Result → lack of individualism

• Beginning of a mass society

Problem of era

• Conditions for individualism (equality, democratic attitudes, open frontier) there.

• But the self-reliant individual hard to find.

• Broad, open, democratic society produced not individualism but conformity

• Beginnings of mass society

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Born in Boston (1803)• Unitarian minister• Leaves church (1832)• Writes series of

essays & gives lectures

• Helps establish Transcendentalism

• Dies in Concord (1882)

Transcendentalism

• Unity of all creation (nature)

• God inside everyone

• Man is inherently good

• Intuition over logic

• Revelation through nature & knowing self

• American Romanticism

Essays

• Nature (1836)• The American

Scholar (1837)• Divinity School

Address (1838)• Self-Reliance (1841)• The Poet (1845)

The American Scholar

• ”We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe”

• Intellectual Declaration of Independence

• Works on national & personal levels

• Call for restoration of the ”One Man”

The American Scholar

• Man Thinking vs. Bookworm

• What are the purposes of books?

Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.

The American Scholar

…love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue.

[Colleges] can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing.

Henry David Thoreau

• Born in Concord (1817)

• Attended Harvard• Worked as handyman

for Emerson• Built cabin in woods

by Walden Pond• Lived there for two

years

Thoreau - works

• Walden (1854)– Experiment in self-

reliance

• ”Resistance to Civil Government”– Why does he go to

jail?– Influence on…?

Walden

"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."

Walden

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. […] Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can.

Walden

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Walden

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man—you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind—I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,

Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.

Walden

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

Walden

• Experiment lasts 2 years

• Never intended as example to follow

• Image of individual going into woods, building cabin, self-reliantly separting self from society—still captures imagination today

Thoreau seen today

• Naturalist

• Vegetarian

• Individualist

• Pacifist

• Transcendentalist

Next week

• Popular Literature

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin

• Slave Narratives

• Read Frederick Douglass