American Transcendentalism: Literature, Reform, and the Institutions of Education in Antebellum America

Guest Lecture: PD Clemens Spahr (Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz)

One often gets the impression that the nineteenth century was, in F. O. Matthiessen's words, "The Age of Emerson"; but it wasn’t. Traditionally, Transcendentalism has almost always been split down the middle between the more individualist 'philosophical' or 'aesthetic' thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau, and the 'social critics' Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, and George Ripley. One of the results of this separation has been the canonization (and thus the dominance) of the 'major' Transcendentalists and, conversely, the marginalization of the 'minor' Transcendentalists. This lecture will establish American Transcendentalism as a broad, reformist movement which centered around a radical aesthetic critique of a wayward modernity at a time when the market increasingly reified human relations. Transcendentalism was a literary, social, and educational movement at a time when these dimensions of intellectual activity were not yet considered separate disciplines. The Transcendentalists carved out their space as intellectuals in a multifaceted response to the multiple challenges and crises of modernity manifesting in nineteenth-century America. As a "movement of elite radicals" (Lance Newman), the Transcendentalists were torn between finding their position in the professionalized literary and intellectual field of the time and reaching beyond this field in the name of more comprehensive social reforms. In order to establish these claims, the lecture will discuss a wide selection of texts, from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Nature" to Amos Bronson Alcott’s Conversations With Children on the Gospels and Margaret Fuller's journalist writings.

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