To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Transcendentalism in literature.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Transcendentalism in literature'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 29 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'Transcendentalism in literature.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Shayegh, Elham. "Sufism And Transcendentalism: A Poststructuralist Dialogue." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1373984875.
Full text
2
Stump, Daniel H. Simms L. Moody. "A plan for teaching American Transcendentalism concept and method /." Normal, Ill. : Illinois State University, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ilstu/fullcit?p9986991.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 2000.Title from title page screen, viewed May 16, 2006. Dissertation Committee: L. Moody Simms (chair), Niles R. Holt, Lawrence W. McBride, Frederick D. Drake, Steven E. Kagle. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 296-299) and abstract. Also available in print.
3
Engels, Ryland Peter Antonij. "Linked Hemispheres: American Literary Transcendentalism and the Southern Continents." Thesis, University of Sydney, 2020. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/23143.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines relationships that formed between US Transcendentalism and the Southern Hemisphere in the nineteenth century. It argues that the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau are relevant to the literary histories of regions including Latin America, Southern Africa and Australasia, and that this fact has been inadequately addressed by criticism. The introduction serves to situate this claim within ongoing debates in fields such as American Studies and World Literature. I contend that the inclusion of Southern Hemispheric literature within these discussions has the potential to enrich our interpretations of both US and world literary texts, particularly by enabling new approaches to be taken to long-standing, transnational questions of race, settler colonialism, globalization and Romantic nationalism. Each chapter centres on a different continental region in the Southern Hemisphere. In each, North American literary perceptions of that region are put into dialogue with nineteenth-century Southern Hemispheric responses to US Transcendentalism. The first chapter is devoted to Latin America; it concerns Edward and Alexander Everett, Sophia Peabody, Mary Mann, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and José Martí. The second chapter focuses on South Africa in the late colonial period and highlights aspects of the thought and work of figures such as Olive Schreiner, Jan Smuts and Mahatma Gandhi. The final chapter considers Australia and the Pacific Islands. It begins with a discussion of the US philosopher Josiah Royce’s tour of Australasia and, thereafter, gives an account of Australian poetry’s response to Transcendentalism. Four poets are included in this section: Charles Harpur, Henry Kendall, William Gay and Bernard O’Dowd. The chapter concludes by drawing parallels between Charles Warren Stoddard’s correspondence with Whitman, his writings about the Pacific Islands and the strains of Primitivism that can be identified in Transcendentalist texts more generally.
4
Myrén, Alexander. "Criticism of Emerson's Transcendentalism in Melville's Moby-Dick." Thesis, Karlstads universitet, Institutionen för språk, litteratur och interkultur (from 2013), 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-70906.
Full textAbstract:
In conceptualizing Moby-Dick; or, the whale, Herman Melville was both drawn and opposed to the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through an analysis of the main characters in MobyDick and Emerson’s writing, it becomes evident that Transcendentalism is embodied in the characterization of the novel’s main characters. I argue that the eventual fates of characters in the novel reveal Melville’s criticism of Emerson’s ideas. Moreover, the depiction of ocean and land as a symbol of the soul in Moby-Dick mirrors Emerson’s idealized relationship between man and nature. However, the ambiguous and horrific nature Melville produces shows that the romantic ideal of Emerson’s is lacking.I skrivandet av Moby Dick eller valen så kom Herman Melville att både inspireras av och motsätta sig Ralph Waldo Emersons idéer. Genom en analys av huvudkaraktärerna i Moby Dick samt Emersons texter så är det tydligt att transcendentalism finns förkroppsligad i karaktäriseringen av romanens huvudkaraktärer. Jag argumenterar för att karaktärernas slutgiltiga öden i romanen uttrycker Melvilles kritik av Emersons idéer. Vidare så är skildringen av hav och land som en symbol för själen i Moby Dick en spegling av Emersons idealiserade förhållande mellan människa och natur. Emellertid den tvetydiga och fruktansvärda natur Melville skapar visar på bristfälligheten i Emersons romantiska ideal.
5
Elliott, Clare Frances. "William Blake's American legacy : transcendentalism and visionary poetics in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/753/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines William Blake's American legacy by identifying a precise American interest in Blake that can be dated from Ralph Waldo Emerson's early reading of Songs of Innocence and Experience in 1842. Chapter one will show that the New England Transcendentalists - primarily Emerson, but also Elizabeth Peabody and readers of the transcendentalis publication The Harbinger - were reading Blake's Poetical Sketchse in the 1840's. This American interest in Blake's poetry will be presented against a background of British neglect of the English poet until after 1863 and the publication of Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake. Chapter one provides details of Emerson's reading of Blake. According to Walter Harding, Emerson owned a copy of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. This was given to him by Elizabeth Peabody in 1842, is inscribed 'R.W. Emerson from his friend E.P.P.', and has notes throughout in Emerson's hand. Indeed, a diary entry of Henry Crabb Robinson (1848) refers to discussions between himself, Emerson and James John Garth Wilkinson about Blake. Drawing on the Transcendentalists' reading of Blake's poetry, chapter two will read Emerson's essay in light of his interest in the English poet. Some critical attention has been given elsewhere to Blakean passages in Emerson's essays, but it has been fleeting. Richard Gravil is the critic who makes the most effort to record Emerson's interest in Blake, but does so sporadically and mainly as a footnote to a larger point about transatlantic Romanticism more generally. Richard O'Keefe's 1995 study, Mythic Archetypes in Ralph Waldo Emerson claims that Emerson was not reading Blake until after 1863; this thesis will challenge that assumption. Chapter two also examines Emerson's later essays and offers a new reading of Society and Solitude (1870) and Letters and Social Aims (1875) by placing these collections alongside a consideration of Blake's prophetic poems, Poetical sketches (1783) and Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794). Chapter three will then show that, in 1868, a transatlantic discussion about the affinities between Whitman's and Blake's poetry emerged simultaneously. Algernon Charles Swinburne opened the discussion in Britain with the publication of his study William Blake, which ended with a long proclamation on the merits of the American poet, Walt Whitman, whose Blakean affinities Swinburne identified as being worthy of critical attention. That same year, in the United States, John Swinton, editor of the New York Times, was reading Blake's poetry aloud at social gatherings and passing off Blake's poems as Whitman's work to audiences familiar with Leaves of Grass. These discussion concerning the similarities between Blake's and Whitman's poetry dwindled into a critical silence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but are reopened here in the form of a transatlantic discussion of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. This thesis queries why a readership of Blake's poetry should have featured so ealry in New England when the British appetite for it was not whetted until after the Gilchrist revival in 1863. My argument suggests that by reading Blake, Emerson and Whitman together, new readings of each of them can profitably be made. By exploring the Blakean affinities in Emerson and Whitman, their visionary qualities - like those found in Blake's prophetic works - become freshly apparent. It will also be argued that something distinctly American can be discerned in Blake's poetry. This original approach to Emerson and Whitman challenges their critically ingrained reputation as writers of America individualism by reinstating them as the heirs to Blake's American legacy.
6
Kollmann, Stephanie E. "Emerson's Transcendentalism Revisited: The Creation and Collapse of the Western Fantasy." Ohio University Honors Tutorial College / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1275968565.
Full text
7
Straight, Leslie. "Transcendental Mirrors: Thoreau's Pond, Poe's Sea, and Melville's Ocean." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2011. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/346.
Full textAbstract:
Three seminal 19 th-century North American literary works feature bodies of water which serve both as key elements in their narrative structure and as symbolic entities within their meaning systems. The protagonists in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Edgar Allan Poe’s A Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick literally define themselves in terms of their relation to these bodies of water. The best way to determine the function of water in the texts is to analyze the initial relationship between water and the central character, the way that water serves as a reflection of the Self, and the way that its Otherness suggests the ultimate possibility of transformation.
8
O'Rourke, Teresa. "The poetics and politics of liminality : new transcendentalism in contemporary American women's writing." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2017. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/33558.
Full textAbstract:
By setting the writings of Etel Adnan, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson and Rebecca Solnit into dialogue with those of the New England Transcendentalists, this thesis proposes a New Transcendentalism that both reinvigorates and reimagines Transcendentalist thought for our increasingly intersectional and deterritorialized contemporary context. Drawing on key re-readings by Stanley Cavell, George Kateb and Branka Arsić, the project contributes towards the twenty-first-century shift in Transcendentalist scholarship which seeks to challenge the popular image of New England Transcendentalism as uncompromisingly individualist, abstract and ultimately the preserve of white male privilege. Moreover, in its identification and examination of an interrelated poetics and politics of liminality across these old and new Transcendentalist writings, the project also extends the scope of a more recent strain of Transcendentalist scholarship which emphasises the dialogical underpinnings of the nineteenth-century movement. The project comprises three central chapters, each of which situates New Transcendentalism within a series of vertical and lateral dialogues. The trajectory of my chapters follows the logic of Emerson s ever-widening circles , in that each takes a wider critical lens through which to explore the dialogical relationship between my four writers and the New England Transcendentalists. In Chapter 1 the focus is upon anthropological theories of liminality; in Chapter 2 upon feminist interventions within psychoanalysis; and in Chapter 3 upon the revisionary work of Post-West criticism. In keeping with the dialogical analogies that inform this project throughout, the relationship examined within this thesis between Adnan, Dillard, Robinson and Solnit and the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists is understood as itself reciprocal, in that it not only demonstrates how my four contemporary writers may be read productively in the light of their New England forebears, but also how those readings in turn invite us to reconsider our understanding of those earlier thinkers.
9
Hills, Alison Macbeth. "Practical confusion aesthetic perception in antebellum New England writing /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=2026918791&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
Full text
10
Deskin, Sean. "Entropy in Two American Road Narratives." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2010. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1243.
Full textAbstract:
Tony Tanner's book City of Words analyzes American literature from 1950-1970; in the chapter entitled "Everything Running Down" the theme of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, is explored and revealed to be a common motif within many works of American literature. Tanner's analysis does not specifically address the presence of entropy within the genre of the American road narrative; when considering his analysis presented in "Everything Running Down" with Kris Lackey's analysis of American road narratives presented in his book RoadFrames, the presence of entropy and how it is applied within the American road narrative becomes apparent. Although Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Cormac McCarthy's The Road were published over sixty years apart from one another and are seemingly disparate texts, these two texts reveal the thematic use of entropy which connects them in an ongoing dialogue within the genre of the American road narrative.
11
Traub, Courtney Anne. "Romanticising crisis : digital revolution and ecological risk in late postmodern American fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:adb4eb33-9053-402c-8322-bd55c915077f.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis probes how recent experimental American "crisis fictions" from authors including Mark Z. Danielewski, Kathryn Davis, and Evan Dara reformulate transatlantic Romantic literary debates about technological and environmental change. Arguing that such texts extend previously theorised ties between Romanticism and postmodernism, it identifies enduring ties between late-postmodern accounts of crisis and those of Romantic predecessors. Responding to the upheavals of digital revolution and ecological risks, these texts, published between 1995 and 2012, inventively engage several linchpin constructs in transatlantic Romantic writing: chiefly, the imagined supersession of subjective and temporal boundaries; a sense that the natural and non-human world is of crucial importance; and a reliance on idioms of sublimity to suggest the unrepresentability of the aforementioned crises. Although numerous critics have traced similarities between Romantic and postmodern modes, this thesis considers those resonances as deeper questions of cultural and literary history. It proposes to more carefully historicise the Romantic intellectual heritage in late postmodernism, identifying intermediating moments that inform contemporary accounts of crisis. It unearths how late postmodern technocultural and environmentalist imaginaries were always already Romantic. Deeply informed by countercultural, mid-century American movements and ideas that themselves drew significantly from transatlantic Romanticism, contemporary figurations of upheaval, syncretically figured in mid-century publications such as the Whole Earth Catalog, are indebted to both Romantic and neo-Romantic heritages. This thesis additionally argues that the digital revolution and unprecedented environmental crisis act as pressures on postmodern literary practices from the mid-1990s onward. Digital speeding and a looming sense of ecological risk register as even earlier crises than the terrorist attacks of "9-11", requiring a recalibration of what the postmodern might mean and do. Crucially, in their preoccupation with embodied realities and environments, including natural ones, the contemporary narratives examined here diverge from the assumption that the natural world bears little importance in postmodern fields of representation. Finally, many recent literary experiments figure themselves as materially participating in the technological and medial systems they respond to; formal experimentation is, accordingly, another centre of interest. This research examines how select texts deploy formal strategies to "materially instantiate" Romantic ideas, to borrow Katherine Hayles's term. Although numerous critics have suggested that Romantic discourse permeates digital cultural imaginaries, existing scholarship devotes little attention to how formal experimentation intersects with narrative strategies.
12
Rowe, Brad James. "Emersonian Perfectionism: A Man is a God in Ruins." DigitalCommons@USU, 2007. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/109.
Full textAbstract:
Ralph Waldo Emerson is a great American literary figure that began his career as a minister at Boston’s Second Church. He discontinued his ministry to become an essayist and lecturer and continued as such for the remainder of his life. This thesis was written with the intent of demonstrating that, in spite of leaving the ministry, Emerson continued to be religious and a religionist throughout his life and that he promulgated a unique religion based upon the principle of self-reliance. At the heart of Emerson’s religion of self-reliance is the doctrine of perfectionism, the infinite capacity of individuals. This thesis defines Emerson’s perfectionism and then tries to locate him in American Studies by contextualizing him with three of his religious contemporaries that were also preaching the doctrine of perfectionism. (109 pages)
13
Brocious, Elizabeth Olsen. "Transcendental Exchange: Alchemical Discourse in Romantic Philosophy and Literature." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2008. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd2301.pdf.
Full text
14
Sarrinikolaou, Irene School of Media Film & Theatre UNSW. "The ontological status of Pirandello???s metacharacters: six characters in search of a Platonic author." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Media, Film & Theatre, 2006. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/25974.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis proposes that a defining feature of Pirandello???s 1921 play ??? Six Characters in Search of an Author, is a relentless transcendentalism. It argues that the play embodies a fascination with existential and conceptual ???occult???, and my hypothesis is that by exploring Pirandello's transcendentalism we may enhance our understanding of how and why Pirandello's play points a mirror up to the invisible and suggests that we could be a reflection of that. Pirandello's drama alludes to some of the most convoluted and enduring debates in western philosophy. However, there is very little English-language material on Pirandello???s relation to philosophy or the relevance of analytical philosophy, metaphysics or epistemology to Pirandello???s playwriting. Even foreign-language studies focus on existentialism, phenomenology and other Continental traditions of philosophy. My contribution is to craft a subjective response to Six Characters in accordance with the methods of analytical philosophy, making use of paradigms and techniques that stem from aesthetics and metaphysics to elucidate a complex self-reflexive play. Chapter One presents analytical philosophy as a potential interpretative framework for the play, whereas chapters two and three explore the metacharacters specifically. This thesis does not seek to offer conclusive assertions about the peculiar ontological status of Pirandello???s metacharacters, rather, it introduces some frameworks and conceptual tools for better approaching their ontolo
15
Eisenman, Matthew S. "Hawthorne's Transcendental Ambivalence in Mosses from an Old Manse." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2011. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/114.
Full textAbstract:
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s collection of short stories, Mosses from an Old Manse, serves as his contribution to the philosophical discussions on Transcendentalism in Concord, MA in the early 1840s. While Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the other individuals involved in the Transcendental club often seem to readily accept the positions presented in Emerson’s work, it is never so simple for Hawthorne. Repeatedly, Hawthorne’s stories demonstrate his difficulty in trying to identify his own opinion on the subject. Though Hawthorne seems to want to believe in the optimistic potential of the spiritual and intellectual ideal presented in Emersonian Transcendentalism, he consistently dwells on the evil and blackness that may be contained in the human heart. The collection of short stories written while Hawthorne lived in Concord and surrounded himself with those dominant literary figures represents the clearest articulation of his ambivalent position on Transcendentalism.
16
Pouffary, Yaël. "Emily Dickinson : le courant ophélien, poésie et représentations picturales." Thesis, Université Côte d'Azur (ComUE), 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019AZUR2008.
Full textAbstract:
Cette recherche a pour objectif de faire émerger l’essence d’Ophélie, au sein de la poésie et de la vie d’Emily Dickinson. Fondés sur une étude comparative d’Emily Dickinson et des représentations d’Ophélie, ces travaux mettent en exergue l’influence indéniable qu’a eue ce personnage dit ‘mineur’ sur la poésie et l’imaginaire du poète, ainsi que son rôle ‘majeur’ sur elle et sur son art. Jean-Luc Nancy explique qu’il existe un point où l’image non-figurative peut elle aussi exister. Il s’agit du point où image et texte fusionnent, où les frontières se brouillent : On parle alors d’un sens à l’essence. Il s’exprime ici dans la force qu’a Emily Dickinson de faire apparaître Ophélie, mais sans jamais l’actualiser entièrement. Cette capacité est propre au poète, comme le définit Emerson. C’est aussi la multiplicité qu’offre Shakespeare au personnage d’Ophélie, cette même symbolique ophélienne, créée grâce aux multiples superpositions de calques qui se retrouvent à travers ses différentes représentations et les exploitations diverses de son iconographie. En se fondant fidèlement sur la doctrine originaire d’Horace « Ut Pictura Poesis erit », Ophélie prend vie dans la poésie d’Emily Dickinson. Cette doctrine rapporte les arts du langage à ceux de l’image, et souligne qu’une poésie muette (la peinture) est comme une peinture parlante (art poétique). Le poète enrichit ainsi le statut de peintre en élargissant sa palette de définition. L’importance d’Ophélie, dans la structure artistique d’Emily Dickinson, est mise en évidence, telle une armature silencieuse à sa composition poétique. C’est pourquoi on ne peut parler d’imitation mais d’influence, qui se fonde sur le concept de Différenciation, de lignes de fuite, de cartographie et enfin de Devenir-mineur vers la création de l’unique. C’est en effet par la soustraction et non l’addition que se crée l’individualité, telle la définition même du rhizome donnée par Gilles Deleuze. Une sorte de beau et une certaine souveraineté de la vérité peuvent alors s’en dégager comme le définit Keats, ce qui évoque la quête centrale de circonférence du poète. Cette thèse s’appuie sur les points cardinaux qui permettent de suivre Emily Dickinson le long de son parcours circonférentiel de vie et sa quête de son Nord-Ophélien. Selon les définitions de la notion de Concept chez Hume, Hegel et Deleuze, la mise en lumière du Concept Ophélien chez Dickinson sera possible. Pour cela, le poète répond à quatre critères : avoir une base de mimesis avec Ophélie – ce qui correspond à l’Est ; avoir la capacité d’en produire des créations ophéliennes – localisées au Sud ; aboutir à une innovation évolutive de son art – positionnée à l’Ouest ; et enfin, atteindre l’immortalité – située au Nord. Au final, cela permettra de définir chez Emily Dickinson le Devenir-Carte Ophélien et son exploitation du Concept OphélienThe Essence of Ophelia within the poetry and life of the poet is unveiled, based on a comparative study of Emily Dickinson and the diverse uses of Ophelia throughout time. This allows to put into evidence the undeniable influence of this so-called ‘minor’ character on Emily Dickinson’s imagination, and her ‘major’ role on the poet and her art. Jean-Luc Nancy explains that there is a point where text and image fuse, where their borders blur and it results in a creation of a non-figurative image – which thus relies solely on individuals’ senses. Ophelia’s symbolism has an abundant amount of layers which allows innumerable interpretations, embellished by The Poet (as defined by Emerson). By leaning faithfully on Horace’s doctrine “Ut Pictura Poesis erit”, Ophelia comes to life in the poetry of Dickinson. Horace’s goals was to place the art of language on the same level as visual arts, thus the idea that a mute poetry (painting) is such as a vocal painting (poetry). This doctrine modifies the status of image and widens the painter’s palette. Consequently, Ophelia will be such as a silent foundation to Emily Dickinson’s poetry, where there is no imitation but solely an artistic influence with the notion of Differentiation, lines of flight, mapping and becoming-Minor which leads to the creation of the unique. According to Keats, it can equivocate to a sovereign truth, central quest of Dickinson’s circumferential journey. This dissertation leans on cardinal points to follow Emily Dickinson along her circumferential journey and her quest of the Ophelian North. Based on the definition of Concept by Hume, Hegel and Deleuze, the Ophelian Concept of Emily Dickinson will be brought forward. In order for that to be possible, the poet will match four criteria: have a mimesis base with Ophelia – which is found in the East, be able to create from that – located in the South, then have it lead to an innovative artistic response – positioned in the West, and finally, that immortality be attained – established in the North. This will allow a definition of Emily Dickinson’s Ophelian Becoming-map and her use of the Ophelian Concept
17
Lewis, Staci E. ""In Death Thy Life is Found": An Examination of the Forgotten Poetry of Margaret Fuller." [Johnson City, Tenn. : East Tennessee State University], 2002. http://etd-submit.etsu.edu/etd/theses/available/etd-0327102-153619/unrestricted/Lewis041002.pdf.
Full text
18
Boss, Aleksandra. "Of Opaque Bodies and Transparent Eyeballs." Doctoral thesis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.18452/19153.
Full textAbstract:
Die vorliegende Dissertation stellt eine Interpretation von Thomas Paines THE AGE OF REASON (1794) und Ralph Waldo Emersons NATURE (1836) als politiktheoretische Traktate vor, die normative Demokratiekonstrukte entwickeln. Diese Demokratiekonstrukte werden anhand ihrer Parameter vergleichend und historisierend gelesen. Die Annahme ist hierbei, dass sich die normativen Demokratieentwürfe beider Autoren mithilfe der Denkfigur des rhizomatischen Panoptizismus explizieren lassen. Die Dissertation leitet diese Denkfigur anhand von Texten des französischen Poststrukturalismus und auf Grundlage des soziologischen Ansatzes der Surveillance Studies her und erläutert seine Relevanz für das Verständnis und die Verhandlung von Demokratie in den Epochen der frühen Republik und des Antebellum in den USA. Ebenso findet eine Analyse der diskursiven Vermittlung dieser Denkfigur durch das religiöse Vokabular von Deismus, Unitarismus und Transzendentalismus in beiden Traktaten statt. Ein ausführliches close reading legt schließlich dar, wie einzelne Parameter eines rhizomatischen Panoptizismus in den Texten entwickelt, repräsentiert und diskutiert werden.The present dissertation introduces an interpretation of Thomas Paine’s THE AGE OF REASON (1794) and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s NATURE (1836) as politico-theoretical tracts that develop normative constructions of democracy. At the core of the analysis lies a comparative and historicist reading of the parameters of these constructions. The thesis informing the analysis posits that both normative constructions of democracy can be made explicit with the aid of the concept of a rhizomatic panopticism. The dissertation develops this concept on the basis of French poststructuralist texts and with theoretical approaches from the sociological field of Surveillance Studies in mind, explaining its relevance for the understanding of democracy during the Early-Republic and Antebellum periods in the USA. Furthermore, the discursive mediation of the introduced concept through the religious vocabularies of Deism, Unitarianism, and Transcendentalism in both tracts receives attention. Finally, a close reading elucidates how the distinct parameters of a rhizomatic panopticism are developed, represented, and discussed in both texts.
19
Wayne, Tiffany K. "Woman thinking feminism and transcendentalism in nineteenth-century America /." Diss., 2001. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/49622183.html.
Full text
20
Wagner, Ulrike. "The Transatlantic Renewal of Textual Practices: Philology, Religion, and Classicism in Madame de Staël, Herder, and Emerson." Thesis, 2012. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8SJ1SQ0.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation demonstrates how the rise of historical criticism in Germany transformed practices of reading, writing, and public address in the related fields of classicism and biblical criticism in a transnational context. In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, writers on both sides of the Atlantic rendered these practices foundational to the goals of self-formation, cultural and spiritual renewal, and educational reform. In this process, Germaine de Staël's De l'Allemagne (1814) played a key role in disseminating new historically informed modes of teaching, preaching, translating, and reconstructing secular and religious texts among Transcendentalists. I show that her cultural study epitomizes crucial characteristics and functions of the historically informed textual practices that Johann Gottfried Herder's works articulated paradigmatically in Germany and which we find refracted in reviews, addresses, essays, and translations by many Antebellum American scholars, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson.
21
Dotterman, Anthony Matthew. "An autumn journey : time, place, and pattern in Henry David Thoreau's later work." Thesis, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1957/30601.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis situates a discussion of Thoreau's later natural history essays in the
context of the author's other writings. Beginning with an examination of the
writings of Thoreau's friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, this paper
examines Thoreau's relation to and departure from Emerson's understanding of
time, place, and pattern in nature. Through a close reading of Thoreau's journal
entries and natural history essays, this thesis follows Thoreau's development as a
naturalist and examines the relationship between his natural history writings and
the American transcendentalist movement.Graduation date: 2002
22
Wester, Bethany S. Moore Dennis. ""At home we work together" domestic feminism and patriarchy in Little Women /." Diss., 2005. http://etd.lib.fsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04042005-114624.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2005.Advisor: Dr. Dennis Moore, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Program in American and Florida Studies. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 17, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 51 pages. Includes bibliographical references.
23
Park, Joon. "From Transcendental Subjective Vision to Political Idealism: Panoramas in Antebellum American Literature." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2012-08-11496.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation explores the importance of the panorama for American Renaissance writers' participation in ideological formations in the antebellum period. I analyze how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe use the panorama as a metaphorical site to contest their different positions on epistemological and sociopolitical agendas such as transcendentalism, masculinist expansionism, and radical abolitionism.
Emerson uses the panorama as a key metaphor to underpin his transcendental idealism and situate it in contemporary debates on vision, gender, and race. Connecting the panorama with optical theories on light and color, Emerson appropriates them to theorize his transcendental optics and makes a hierarchical distinction between light/transparency/panorama as metaphors for spirit, masculinity, and race-neutral man versus color/opacity/myopic vision for body, femininity, and racial-colored skin. In his paean to the moving panorama, Thoreau expresses his desire for Emersonian correspondence between nature and the spirit through transcendental panoramic vision. However, Thoreau's esteem for nature's materiality causes his panoramic vision to be corporeal and empirical in its deviation from the decorporealized vision in Emerson?s notion of transparent eyeball. Hawthorne repudiates the Transcendentalists' and social reformers' totalizing and absolutist idealism through his critique of the panorama and the emphasis on opacity and ambiguity of the human mind and vision. Hawthorne reveals how the panorama satisfies the desire for visual and physical control over the rapidly expanding world and the fantasy of access to truth. Countering the dominant convention of the Mississippi panorama that objectifies slaves as a spectacle for romantic tourism, Box Brown and Wells Brown open up a new American subgenre of the moving panorama, the anti-slavery panorama. They reconstruct black masculinity by verbally and visually representing real-life stories of some male fugitive slaves and idealizing them as masculine heroes of the anti-slavery movement. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe criticizes how the favorable representation of slavery and the objectification of slaves in the Mississippi panorama and the picturesque help to construct her northern readers' uncompassionate and hard-hearted attitudes toward the cruel realities of slavery and presents Tom's sympathetic and humanized "eyes" as an alternative vision.
24
Dwiggins, Laura J. "Henry Thoreau's Debt to Society: A Micro Literary History." 2013. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses/1034.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines Henry David Thoreau’s relationships with New England-based authors, publishers, and natural scientists, and their influences on his composition and professional development. The study highlights Thoreau’s collaboration with figures such as John Thoreau, Jr., William Ellery Channing II, Horace Greeley, and a number of correspondents and natural scientists. The study contends that Thoreau was a sociable and professionally competent author who relied not only on other major Transcendentalists, but on members from an array of intellectual communities at all stages of his career.
25
Carvalho, Evelise de. "Star Trek: going beyond all frotiers." Master's thesis, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/1822/76394.
Full textAbstract:
Dissertação de mestrado in English Language, Literature and CultureThe present study aims to approach the question of the frontier notably identified in the American culture. It has been an intrinsic feature of the background of the United States for a long time and the focus herein will be both the zeitgeist of the sixties, when Star Trek was initially just a TV show, and also later on when it became the most long-lasting cult masterpiece in TV and cinema history as well. This dissertation is comprised of three main objectives: exploring the question of the frontier, both physical and non-physical, which demonstrates the human being’s capacity and approach towards the unknown; characterizing the human relation, from the aspects of both material and immaterial frontiers; and discussing the question of artificial intelligence in relation to the human frontier and its implications for the development and evolution of mankind. Such questions contained in the episodes of the original television series Star Trek, as well as in the movie Star Trek - The Motion Picture, will be analyzed and compared with excerpts from Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which are pertinent to the context of Star Trek. In addition, Allan Shapiro’s ideas and contributions, Dr. Darren R. Reid’s and Dr. Peter Norberg’s considerations will be examined, due to their relevant topics and concepts to the time when they were produced, as well as today and most likely, for many years to come. Similarly, interviews with Eugene Wesley Roddenberry, his son Rod Roddenberry, and William Shatner, will be discussed and inserted into both current historical and social contexts.
O presente estudo tem por objetivo abordar a questão da fronteira, especialmente identificada na cultura americana e que é uma característica intrínseca do cenário norte-americano há muito tempo. O foco do trabalho será o zeitgeist da década de sessenta, época em que, inicialmente, Star Trek era apenas uma série de TV e também os anos subsequentes, quando se tornou a produção mais duradoura da história do cinema e da televisão. Esta dissertação apresenta três objetivos principais: explorar a questão da fronteira, tanto física quanto não-física, que demonstra a capacidade do ser humano e sua abordagem em relação ao desconhecido; caracterizar a relação humana a partir dos aspectos das fronteiras material e imaterial; e discutir a questão da inteligência artificial, levando-se em conta o limite humano, bem como suas implicações ao desenvolvimento e evolução da humanidade. Todas essas questões, contidas nos episódios da série original de televisão Star Trek, assim como o filme Star Trek - The Motion Picture, serão analisadas e comparadas com excertos da obra Nature, de Ralph Waldo Emerson, que são pertinentes ao contexto de Star Trek. Além disso, serão examinadas as ideias e contribuições de Allan Shapiro, do Dr. Darren R. Reid e do Dr. Peter Norberg, devido aos tópicos e conceitos relevantes à época em que surgiram, à atualidade e também a gerações futuras. De forma similar, entrevistas com Eugene Wesley Roddenberry, seu filho Rod Roddenberry e William Shatner, serão discutidas e inseridas nos contextos histórico e social contemporâneos.
26
Cope, Emily A. "The Dial and the Transcendentalist Theory of Reading." 2008. http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/348.
Full textAbstract:
The two major anthologies of Transcendentalism, Perry Miller’s The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (1950) and Joel Myerson’s Transcendentalism: A Reader (2000), illustrate the scholarly divide over whether the movement was primarily religious or social and political in nature. Where Miller’s volume prioritizes the Transcendentalists’ theological radicalism, Myerson’s emphasizes their interest in social and political reform. This paper presents a third alternative: that the Transcendentalists be understood primarily as a community of readers invested in reimagining how and why antebellum Americans read, a concern we can see clearly in the pages of the Dial. Margaret Fuller’s article “A Short Essay on Critics,” the first article in the Dial’s inaugural issue set the tone by lamenting the laziness and passivity of American readers and by calling for a new kind of criticism that met the demands of empowered readers. Positioning herself with all readers, she wrote, “Able and experienced men write for us, and we would know what they think, as they think it not for us but for themselves… We would converse with him [the critic], secure that he will tell us all his thought, and speak as man to man.” What Fuller asked for was an altogether new understanding of the relationship between readers and critics. Throughout the Dial’s fouryear run, the Transcendentalists used it to propose and practice a radical new theory of reading, one that departed from models dominant in the university and the church. Dial editors and contributors rejected hierarchical models of reading that located authority in a text, an author, or a critic. Instead, they insisted that the individual reader determine the meaning and value of literature through an intuitive connection with “Spirit.” Proper interpretation, they argued, is not strictly personal, but transpersonal, with the best interpretations emerging dialectically from sympathetic “conversations” between the author and the individual reader, and between the individual reader and a community of inspired readers. Because they imagined reading as conversation, the Transcendentalists constructed the Dial as a virtual salon, a place where these personal conversations could become communal.
27
Cristo, George Constantine. "Unraveling Walt Whitman." Thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/899.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2007.Title from screen (viewed on Apr. 27, 2007) Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-70)
28
Bhagwanani, Ashna. "Deviant Society: The Self-Reliant "Other" in Transcendental America." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10012/7736.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation utilizes theories of deviance in conjunction with literary methods of reading and analyzing to study a range of deviant or transgressive characters in American literature of the 1840s and 50s. I justify this methodology on the basis of the intersecting and related histories of Emersonian self-reliance and deviance in American thought. I contend that each of the texts of self-reliance discussed by the dissertation – The National Police Gazette (1845-present), Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” (1849) and Walden (1854), and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) – actually sanctions deviance. Since deviance is endorsed by these texts in some shape or form, it is a critical component of American culture; consequently American culture is one that promotes deviance.
My work on Douglass and Thoreau employs the sociological theories of Robert K. Merton (1949) to investigate the tensions between the culturally lauded goal of self-reliance and the legitimate means for securing this. I explore the importance of Transcendentalist self-reliance to the American Dream ethos and the ways in which it is valorized by each protagonist.
The work on the National Police Gazette puts popular and elite forms of literary discourse into conversation with one another. My primary concern here is with explaining why and how specific self-reliant behaviours are deemed “deviant” in the literary context, but “criminal” by popular works.
The chapters on female deviance elucidate the confines of women’s writing and writing about women as well as the acceptable female modes of conduct during the nineteenth century. They also focus on the ways female characters engaged in deviance from within these rigid frameworks. A functionalist interrogation of female deviance underscores the ways society is united against those women who are classed as unwomanly or unfeminine.
My conclusion seeks to reinvigorate the conversation regarding the intersection between literature and the social sciences and suggests that literature in many ways often anticipates sociological theory. Ultimately, I conclude by broadening the category of the self-reliant individual to include, for instance, females and African-American slaves who were otherwise not imagined to possess such tendencies. Thus, this dissertation revises notions of Emerson’s concept of self-reliance by positioning it instead as a call to arms for all Americans to engage in deviant or socially transgressive behaviour.
29
Greyvensteyn, Annette. "Hans Christian Andersen's romantic imagination : exploring eighteenth and nineteenth century romantic conceptualisations of the imagination in selected fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen." Diss., 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/25146.
Full textAbstract:
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 119-131)Text in English with summaries in English and Afrikaans
There are certain influences from the eighteenth and nineteenth century English and German romantic Zeitgeist that can be discerned in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. The role of the imagination stands out as a particularly dominant notion of the romantic period as opposed to the emphasis on reason during the Enlightenment. It is this romantic influence that Andersen’s tales especially exemplify. For him the imagination is transcendent – one can overcome the mystery and hardship of an earthly existence by recasting situations imaginatively and one can even be elevated to a higher, spiritual realm by its power. The transcendent power of the imagination is best understood by viewing it through the lens of negative capability, a concept put forward by romantic poet, John Keats. The concept implies an “imaginative openness” to what is, which allows one to tolerate life’s uncertainties and the inexplicable suffering that forms part of one’s earthly existence by using the imagination to open up new potential within trying circumstances. In selected fairy tales, Andersen’s child protagonists transcend their circumstances by the power of their imagination. In other tales, nature is instrumental in this imaginative transcendence. The natural world conveys spiritual truths and has a moralising influence on the characters, bringing them closer to the Ultimate Creator. This follows the philosophy of German Naturphilosophie, as well as that of English romantics like Coleridge and Wordsworth, for whom nature functions as a portal to the spiritual world. The concept of the “sublime” underpins this philosophy. If nature is viewed through an imaginative, instead of an empirical lens, it becomes the means by which the temporal world can be transcended. It is a message of hope and as such is in keeping with Andersen’s self professed calling as visionary who uses his art to uplift mankind. In this he is the ultimate romantic hero or outsider who, while standing on the periphery of society, observes its shortcomings and feels called upon to show the way to a better world.
Sekere invloede van agtiende- en negentiende eeuse Engelse en Duitse romantisisme kan in Hans Christian Andersen se feëverhale bespeur word. Veral die rol van die verbeelding staan uit as ‘n dominante invloed van romantisisme, in teenstelling met die laat sewentien- en vroeë agtiende eeuse fokus op rasionaliteit. Dit is hierdie romantiese invloed wat Andersen se verhale veral versinnebeeld. Vir hom is die verbeelding transendentaal – ‘n mens kan die misterie en swaarkry van jou aardse bestaan oorkom deur situasies deur die oog van die verbeelding te bejeën en kan selfs deur die mag van die verbeelding opgehef word na ‘n hoër, meer spirituele vlak. Die transendentale mag van die verbeelding kan beter begryp word wanneer dit deur die lens van “negative capability” gesien word. Hierdie konsep is deur die romantiese digter, John Keats, voorgestel. Die konsep impliseer ‘n verbeeldingryke openheid in die aangesig van aardse onsekerheid en swaarkry, wat die mens uiteindelik in staat stel om nuwe potensiaal in moeilike omstandighede raak te sien. In uitgekose feëverhale, oorkom Andersen se kinderprotagoniste hul moeilike omstandighede deur die mag van die verbeelding. In ander verhale is die natuur deurslaggewend in dié transendentale verbeeldingsreis. Nie net dra die natuur geestelike waarhede oor nie, maar dit het ook ‘n moraliserende invloed op die karakters, wat hulle nader aan ‘n Opperwese bring. Dit herinner aan die Duitse Naturphilosophie, asook die sienswyse van Engelse romantikusse soos Coleridge en Wordsworth, vir wie die natuur ‘n deurgangsroete na die geestelike wêreld is. Die idee van die “sublime” is onderliggend aan hierdie filosofie. As die natuur deur middel van die verbeeldingslens, in plaas van deur ‘n empiriese lens bejeën word, kan dit ‘n manier word om die aardse te oorkom. Dit is dus ‘n boodskap van hoop wat in lyn is met Andersen se selfopgelegde taak as profeet wat sy kuns gebruik om die mensdom op te hef. In hierdie opsig is hy die absolute romantiese held of buitestaander, wat, ofskoon hy aan die buitewyke van die samelewing staan, tóg tekortkominge raaksien en geroepe voel om die weg na ‘n beter wêreld te wys.
English Studies
M.A. (English)