Due today: your paraphrasing of Emerson's Nature. This will be collected at the beginning of the class; as we are reviewing in class, none will be accepted late.
Due tomorrrow, Tuesday 10 January: vocabulary 7
Due Wednesday 18 January, Thanatoposis essay. See handouts and copies on last week's blogs.
In class today we are breaking down Emerson's Nature. As you have probably noticed, the ideas are similar to those in Thanatopsis.
Below are phrases and images that reflect TRANSCENDENTALISM.
To reiterate:Transcendentalism is an American literary, political, and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new era was at hand. They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson's words, “an original relation to the universe." Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in their writing. By the 1840s they, along with other transcendentalists, were engaged in the social experiments of Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden; and, by the 1850s in an increasingly urgent critique of American slavery.
Below is the material we are discussing in class today.
Excerpts from Emerson’s Nature, looking closely at the text
1. How can nature be “comic or a mourning piece?
2. What identifies this sentence as an example of Romanticism? “Crossing a bare common…under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed perfect exhilaration.”
3. “I am glad to the brink of fear.”
4. Identify the figurative language device here: “a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough.”
5. How is this possible? “In the woods, a man…is always a child.”
Related…the child is the father of the man
6. What are the “plantations of God?”
7. According to Emerson, where might we find “reason and faith?”
8. What does he mean when he says “all mean egotism vanishes?”
9. How can man “become a transparent eye-ball?”
10. How is it possible to be “part or particle of God?”
11. Read these lines and explain how someone who is a follower of Emerson and Transcendentalism could not support slavery? “The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,--master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.”
12. What poetic practice is expressed in this line? “…especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.”
13. Hmmm…how can there be an “an occult relation between man the vegetable?”
14. What is the “power [that] produce[s] this delight” reside?
15. To what power is Emerson referring?
1. How can nature be “comic or a mourning piece?
2. What identifies this sentence as an example of Romanticism? “Crossing a bare common…under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed perfect exhilaration.”
3. “I am glad to the brink of fear.”
4. Identify the figurative language device here: “a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough.”
5. How is this possible? “In the woods, a man…is always a child.”
Related…the child is the father of the man
6. What are the “plantations of God?”
7. According to Emerson, where might we find “reason and faith?”
8. What does he mean when he says “all mean egotism vanishes?”
9. How can man “become a transparent eye-ball?”
10. How is it possible to be “part or particle of God?”
11. Read these lines and explain how someone who is a follower of Emerson and Transcendentalism could not support slavery? “The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,--master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.”
12. What poetic practice is expressed in this line? “…especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.”
13. Hmmm…how can there be an “an occult relation between man the vegetable?”
14. What is the “power [that] produce[s] this delight” reside?
15. To what power is Emerson referring?
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