1. Transcendentalism:
Definition:
Transcendentalism is a group of ideas in literature and philosophy that developed in the 1830s and '40s as a protest against the general state of culture and society. It is more of a tendency, an attitude, than the philosophy of Transcendentalists, speaking for cultural rejuvenation, and against the materialism of America society.
Main themes:
Emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul: the most important thing in the universe. (a new way of looking at the world)
Stress the importance of individualism. The individual is the most important element of society.
(A new way of looking at man)
Nature as symbolic of the spirit of God. Nature was filled with God’s overwhelming presence. Transcendentalism is based on the fact that the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of senses. (The physical world is a symbol of the spiritual)
Representative writers:
Its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Emerson, who believed that man was a part of absolute good, and in Thoreau, who beheld divinity in the “unspotted innocence” of nature.
To later generations, scared by the horrors of the civil war, the transcendenlist persuasion that humanity was godlike and that evil was nonexistent appeared to be an optimistic folly. Yet transcendentalism was a powerful expression of the intellectual mood of the age, and the ideas it represented have remained a strong influence on great American writers from the days of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman to the present.
2. Favorite work:
Emerson——Self-Reliance
Emerson is one of the most outstanding American writers in the19th century. His Self-Reliance is an influential work which deeply attracts me. “Believe in oneself” is the main idea expressed and analyzed in the work. In Self-Reliance, there exist four kinds of important thoughts. The first kind of thought is “The Confidence”. Emerson advocated that a man must show his opinion confidently and bravely in spite of different ideas. The second is “The Independence” which states that a man should keep himself firmly but not be easily influenced by environment. The third kind of thought is to keep personality. From Emerson’s opinion, a man must keep his personality and conform to his own pr inciples. “Showing no Sympathy to the Poor” is the fourth kind of thought. It shows that why the poor are poor is mainly due to their backward thinking. All these ideas in Emerson’s Self-reliance have enlightenments on today’s society. They help me take confident and optimistic attitudes towards life. Besides, they are crucial for individuals’ success——each man who possesses the thoughts is easy to make progress and achieve success.
3. Favorite writer:
Emerson
Influence:
1). as the leading New England Transcendentalist, Emerson affected a most articulate synthesis
of the Transcendentalist views.
2). He was widely known and admired as a poet, philosopher, public lecturer, and essayist. His essays were the most important work in English prose produced in the 19th century. Important works
•Nature:His most important work which establishes the bases of his Transcendentalist idea.
•Self-Reliance: A famous essay calling for the need of self-reliance.
•The Divinity School Address
•The American Scholar
His writing style
•He did invent a new form or mode.He developed an inherited form so freely and excellently as an expressive, dynamic medium for his own needs that he was able to produce a prose work that possessed all the freshness of originality in the true sense.
•Brilliant as his skill was in sentence-making; his feeling for compositional wholeness has been criticized for weakness. He is one of the most quotable of modern writers. His phrases and sentences can be detached from their context and quoted freely.
•His Verse:When seen in the light of the formal and linguistic sense, his verse is typically untraditional and unprecedented. His verses are impressive for their freshness, intensity, inventiveness, and prophetic power.。