To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Transcendentalism (New England).
Journal articles on the topic 'Transcendentalism (New England)'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 32 journal articles for your research on the topic 'Transcendentalism (New England).'
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 journal articles on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Duarte Lacerda, José Augusto. "Isolation." Per Musi 24 (December 8, 2023): 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.35699/2317-6377.2023.48481.
Full textAbstract:
The life and work of North American composer Stuart Saunders Smith (1948) have shown features reminiscent of the 19th century philosophical movement known as New England Transcendentalism. Here I discuss how ideas divulged by Transcendentalism and transcendentalist philosophies, in particular oneness, freethinking, anti-materialism, anti-technologism, and silence reflect in Smith’s life stances and compositional process. Based on a belief that oneness binds all living beings via a universal soul, Smith seeks to symbolically unify composer, performer, and audience through the use of silence and a compositional technique called co-existence. In turn, anti-materialism and anti-technologism manifest musically in his frugal use of instrumentation, and in his refusal to write for electronics while evoking naturalistic themes, respectively.
2
Majdoubeh, Ahmad. "GIBRAN'S THE PROCESSION IN THE TRANSCENDENTALIST CONTEXT." Arabica 49, no. 4 (2002): 477–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15700580260375425.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractThe aim of this article is to examine Gibran Kahlil Gibran's ideas, as articulated in The Procession (Al-Mawākib), in the context of New England Transcendentalism, in particular Emerson's and Thoreau's. Even though critics recognize Ralph Waldo Emerson (and less frequently Henry David Thoreau) as an influence on Gibran, the precise nature of the influence has not been spelled out clearly. In this study, I shall attempt to do so. To the end of establishing the New England Transcendentalist influence on Gibran more firmly and coherently, I locate, explain, and highlight some of the striking echoes, similarities, and analogies (linguistic, philosophic, as well as structural) in Gibran's The Procession, on the one hand, and Emerson's essays and Thoreau's Walden, on the other hand. Such an examination of the relationship will certainly enrich the meanings of Gibran's poem, shed a new light on his ideas, and suggest an angle from which his philosophy is best viewed.
3
Lapsley, James N. "Charles Ives and the Reformed Tradition." Theology Today 64, no. 3 (October 2007): 305–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/004057360706400303.
Full textAbstract:
The American composer Charles Ives (1874–1954) was rooted in New England Congregationalism, the Puritan wing of the Reformed tradition. Although he is often seen as an innovative composer identified with New England transcendentalism, he never abandoned his Reformed evangelical faith but rather expressed it in some of his greatest music, particularly the Third and Fourth Symphonies.
4
Nicholas L. Guardiano. "Charles S. Peirce's New England Neighbors and Embrace of Transcendentalism." Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 53, no. 2 (2017): 216. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.53.2.03.
Full text
5
Faflik, David. "Critique, Belief, and the Negative Tendencies of New England Transcendentalism." ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 66, no. 3 (2020): 518–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/esq.2020.0010.
Full text
6
Howe, Daniel Walker. "The Cambridge Platonists of Old England and the Cambridge Platonists of New England." Church History 57, no. 4 (December 1988): 470–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3166653.
Full textAbstract:
In 1875 the distinguished Unitarian minister and local historian Henry Wilder Foote preached a eulogy for his late colleague, the Reverend James Walker, philosopher and former president of Harvard University. It was an appropriate occasion to characterize the achievement of the antebellum generation of Harvard Unitarian leaders that Walker represented. “They were much more than mere denominationalists or founders of a sect,” Foote declared. “The whole tone of their teaching was profoundly positive in its moral and religious quality. Trained at our American Cambridge, they were really the legitimate heirs of that noble group of men nurtured at the Cambridge of England–the Latitude Men, as they were called–who blended culture and piety and rational thought in their teaching.” Building upon Foote's perceptive characterization, this article will explore the significance of the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists for the Harvard Unitarians of the mid-nineteenth century. In so doing it may illuminate other forms of New England religious thought that also drew upon Platonic or Neoplatonic sources, including Edwardseanism, Hopkinsianism, and the progressive orthodoxy of Horace Bushnell. In particular, I hope to shed light on the relationship between Unitarianism and Transcendentalism.
7
Mauk, David C. "New England Transcendentalism versus Virulent Nationalism: The Evolution of Charles Ives' Patriotic march Music." American Studies in Scandinavia 31, no. 1 (March 1, 1999): 24–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.22439/asca.v31i1.1478.
Full text
8
Alqaryouti, Marwan, and Ala Eddin Sadeq. "Vision of Death in Emily Dickinson's Selected Poems." Asian Social Science 13, no. 5 (April 19, 2017): 16. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ass.v13n5p16.
Full textAbstract:
Poetry is greatly influenced by the cultural background and personal experiences of the poets. Emily Dickson’s poems exemplify this because she draws a lot of her motivation from her heritage of New England and her life experience which had harsh incidents such as loss of friends and relatives. She lives a life of seclusion, where she rarely has face-to-face encounter with her friends as she prefers communicating through letters. Her limited interaction with the society gives her adequate space to reflect and write about different aspects of life. Emily’s poetry is also influenced by the doubts she holds about Christianity, especially in relation with survival of the soul after death. "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" and "I Heard a Fly Buzz- when I Died" are among her popular poems that indicate her religious doubt. She agrees with some of the Calvinist religious beliefs, but still has some doubts about the innate depravity of mankind and the concept of the afterlife.Dickinson’s spiritual background is indicated by her religious beliefs, which form the basis of her preoccupation with death. Although Dickinson is a religious person who believes in the inevitability of death and afterlife, she is a non-conformist as she is skeptical and curious about the nature of death. Transcendentalism is the other factor that contributes to Dickinson’s preoccupation with death as indicated in her poems. Dickinson’s preoccupation with death also results from her obsession, which is greatly contributed by the life experiences she has with death including loss of her family, mentors and close friends.
9
Barth, J. Robert, and Elizabeth C. Nordbeck. "Coleridge's Orthodoxy in Transcendentalist New England." Wordsworth Circle 32, no. 3 (June 2001): 142–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/twc24044780.
Full text
10
Clark, Justin. "The Origins of Blind Autobiography in Visionary Antebellum New England." New England Quarterly 87, no. 2 (June 2014): 228–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00368.
Full textAbstract:
During the antebellum period, blind Americans began telling their life stories in print for the first time. This essay argues that these blind autobiographers succeeded not only by engaging the public's sympathy but also by illuminating New England's ongoing transcendentalist and visionary Protestant debates on the nature of sight.
11
Rampell, Palmer. "Laws That Refuse To Be Stated: The Post-Sectarian Spiritualities of Emerson, Thoreau, and D. T. Suzuki." New England Quarterly 84, no. 4 (December 2011): 621–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00132.
Full textAbstract:
Drawing on previously untranslated Japanese articles, this essay reveals the powerful and sustained influence New England transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau exerted on the highly renowned and yet highly unorthodox arbiter of Japanese Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki.
12
Bakratcheva, Albena. "‘Higher Laws’ and ‘Divine Madness’: Transnational and Translocal Configurations of Quixotic In/Sanity in the American Renaissance." Review of International American Studies 13, no. 2 (December 31, 2020): 87–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.31261/rias.9827.
Full textAbstract:
The New England Transcendentalists deliberately chose a position which by definition did not belong to what was to them the common “prosaic mood” (Thoreau) of their time. Their choice was the result of representatively romantic discontent with their contemporary reality and, at the same time, through the vigorous drive of the Puritan spiritual leadership, it was essentially anachronistic. The sophisticated delight of identifying with such a doubly anomalous nonconformist ideal only intensified the need for counterbalancing the prosaic sanity of the real world with a wished-for poetic insanity, or “madness from the gods” (Emerson). Such “madness by romantic identification” whose “features have been fixed once and for all by Cervantes” (Foucault), naturally caused “Quixotic confusion” between reality and imagination and the substitution of the true with the fabulous. Though peculiarly intensified in the former Puritan context and in the context of ‘Americanness’ in which the nineteenth century New England intellectuals placed it, the problem was far from being merely a local, New England-centered, phenomenon. This paper argues that in their ‘in/sane’ Quixotic quest for perfection, which caused a series of personal failures, the New England Transcendentalists were remarkably faithful saunterers in a blessed place that, to them, was both America and, at the same time, the all-encompassing perennial—translocal and transnational—world, inviting them to establish what Emerson called “an original relation to the universe.”
13
Bakratcheva, Albena. "‘Higher Laws’ and ‘Divine Madness’: Transnational and Translocal Configurations of Quixotic In/Sanity in the American Renaissance." Review of International American Studies 13, no. 2 (December 31, 2020): 87–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.31261/rias.9827.
Full textAbstract:
The New England Transcendentalists deliberately chose a position which by definition did not belong to what was to them the common “prosaic mood” (Thoreau) of their time. Their choice was the result of representatively romantic discontent with their contemporary reality and, at the same time, through the vigorous drive of the Puritan spiritual leadership, it was essentially anachronistic. The sophisticated delight of identifying with such a doubly anomalous nonconformist ideal only intensified the need for counterbalancing the prosaic sanity of the real world with a wished-for poetic insanity, or “madness from the gods” (Emerson). Such “madness by romantic identification” whose “features have been fixed once and for all by Cervantes” (Foucault), naturally caused “Quixotic confusion” between reality and imagination and the substitution of the true with the fabulous. Though peculiarly intensified in the former Puritan context and in the context of ‘Americanness’ in which the nineteenth century New England intellectuals placed it, the problem was far from being merely a local, New England-centered, phenomenon. This paper argues that in their ‘in/sane’ Quixotic quest for perfection, which caused a series of personal failures, the New England Transcendentalists were remarkably faithful saunterers in a blessed place that, to them, was both America and, at the same time, the all-encompassing perennial—translocal and transnational—world, inviting them to establish what Emerson called “an original relation to the universe.”
14
Handy, Ellen. "Transfiguration: Southworth and Hawes, Reproduced Images and Body." Artium Quaestiones, no. 33 (December 30, 2022): 39–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/aq.2022.33.2.
Full textAbstract:
The Harrison Horblit Collection at the Harvard University’s Houghton Library contains a remarkable daguerreotype plate by the Boston firm Southworth & Hawes. It reproduces an engraving after Raphael’s Transfiguration. Whereas reproductive printmaking normally seeks to produce multiples of a unique original, daguerreotype reproductions open a space of ambiguity between the categories of original and reproduction since daguerreotypes are unique objects. Much is lost in this translation, but what is gained? If reproduction of paintings normally renders the singular multiple, what happens when a painting is reproduced as a unique image? Why was this daguerreotype created? Southworth & Hawes specialized in portraits of celebrities and considered themselves artists. Why then did they make a daguerreotype of an engraving of a painting? And why this painting?Their image of an image of an image is at once simply duplicative and a meditation on photography itself – an expanded conception of photography that figures it as spiritual and conceptual practice, as is suggested in other conflations of image reproduction and transfiguration within Southworth & Hawes’ oeuvre as well. The logic of the Southworth & Hawes’ Transfiguration becomes less a conundrum when considered in relation to two of their other images, one of the branded hand of abolitionist Jonathan Walker, the other a self-portrait representing Southworth’s torso as a classical sculpture. Translation, transfiguration, body, soul and image are closely imbricated in all three of these daguerreotypes, each produced during the height of New England Transcendentalism. While Raphael’s Transfiguration epitomizes the intersection of the human and a divine being as Scriptural drama, The Branded Hand and Southworth as a Classical Bust allude to the spiritual realm through representation of the soul’s transcendence of the suffering body rather than direct reference to scripture. The Branded Hand detaches subject from the context of the body as a whole; Walker’s wound appears in the image as the silvery trace of the price paid for his abolitionist conviction. The portrait of Southworth separates an individual man’s identity from the more allegorical presence, while presenting suggestions of sorrow as emblems of spiritual elevation. But beyond this, the transmedial daguerreotype of the print of the Raphael announces itself as visual metonymy; the transfiguration of Christ in the painting also conveys the transfigurative power of the photographic medium itself.
15
Ryden, Kent C. "Hawthorne in the Field: The American Notebooks as New England Nature Writing." Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 49, no. 1 (May 2023): 7–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.49.1.0007.
Full textAbstract:
ABSTRACT While Nathaniel Hawthorne may not conventionally be seen as a nature writer, this essay argues that he is a specifically regional nature writer, responding to and describing the contents and qualities of New England landscapes not as abstractions of an idealized natural world but as concrete places that have been shaped by particularly regional patterns of human use taking place within a discrete set of environmental circumstances. That is, I argue that there is such a thing as a regionally distinct “New England nature” and that Hawthorne writes as a sort of field investigator of that natural world, an approach quite different from that taken by his Transcendentalist contemporaries like Emerson and Thoreau.
16
Jordan, Alexander. "An Unpublished Letter from Thomas Carlyle to his Editor in New England, Charles Stearns Wheeler." New England Quarterly 96, no. 2 (June 1, 2023): 160–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00982.
Full textAbstract:
Abstract Considerable scholarly attention has been lavished on the relationship between the great Victorian man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and the Transcendentalist luminary Ralph Waldo Emerson, particularly regarding Emerson's role in publishing Carlyle's works in America. However, a newly discovered letter underlines the fact that Emerson did not act alone, having received crucial support in editing Carlyle's works from Charles Stearns Wheeler, a young Harvard graduate.
17
Fulton, Joe B. "Reason for a Renaissance: The Rhetoric of Reformation and Rebirth in the Age of Transcendentalism." New England Quarterly 80, no. 3 (September 2007): 383–407. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tneq.2007.80.3.383.
Full textAbstract:
The term American Renaissance, commonly thought to have been coined in the twentieth century, actually originated with the transcendentalists themselves, with writers like William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller using the twin concepts of reformation and renaissance to ally their literary and spiritual projects with New England's Protestant heritage.
18
Norton, David L. "The Moral Individualism of Henry David Thoreau." Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 19 (March 1985): 239–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1358246100004616.
Full textAbstract:
Henry Thoreau boasted that he was widely travelled in Concord, Massachusetts. He was born there on 12 July 1817, and he died there on 6 May 1862, of tuberculosis, at the age of forty-four years. In 1837 he graduated from Harvard College, and in 1838 he joined Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and others in the informal group that became known as the New England Transcendentalists. The author of four books, many essays and poems, and a voluminous journal, he is best known for the book Walden and the essay ‘Civil Disobedience’, and for the circumstances attending these two milestones in American thought and literature.
19
Norton, David L. "The Moral Individualism of Henry David Thoreau." Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 19 (March 1985): 239–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0957042x00004612.
Full textAbstract:
Henry Thoreau boasted that he was widely travelled in Concord, Massachusetts. He was born there on 12 July 1817, and he died there on 6 May 1862, of tuberculosis, at the age of forty-four years. In 1837 he graduated from Harvard College, and in 1838 he joined Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and others in the informal group that became known as the New England Transcendentalists. The author of four books, many essays and poems, and a voluminous journal, he is best known for the book Walden and the essay ‘Civil Disobedience’, and for the circumstances attending these two milestones in American thought and literature.
20
Muehl, Siegmar. "A Brief Encounter Between Friedrich Muench, German-American Rationalist in Missouri, and Theodore Parker, New England Transcendentalist." Yearbook of German-American Studies 28 (December 1, 1993): 13–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.17161/ygas.v28i.19213.
Full text
21
VON FRANK, ALBERT J. "WHERE'S WALDO?" Modern Intellectual History 16, no. 02 (March 16, 2018): 667–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1479244318000082.
Full textAbstract:
As a young man, Thoreau found the pencil of American manufacture a gross and greasy tool unfit for finer uses. In a breakthrough, then, for the family business, he discovered that by grinding the graphite to a near impalpable powder, then mixing it with clay just so, a pencil could be made that would write and sketch with such elegance and precision as to out-perform the standard Old World imports. It is hard to say whether Thoreau's technological fix was an application of the New England Transcendentalist imagination or, more prosaically, a shrewd colluding with the Industrial Revolution and the global market economy. But increasingly, and especially as we observe the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth, here is where we find him most: at the pivot point between this world and a world made better by intelligence, between raw nature and its sublimated refinement into meanings. We tend rightly to suppose that we can't have too many watchers posted at that gate.
22
Bregman, Jay. "Synesius of Cyrene and the American “Synesii”." NUMEN 63, no. 2-3 (March 9, 2016): 299–323. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685276-12341424.
Full textAbstract:
This article explores the Hellenic/Christian synthesis of bishop Synesius and its later influence, especially on nineteenth-century America. Synesius accepted a bishopric despite Neoplatonic reservations concerning Christian doctrine: the uncreated soul pre-exists; the uncreated cosmos is eternal; and the “resurrection” an ineffable mystery, beyond the vulgar. Whether or not born a Christian, his study under Hypatia brought about a conversion to “pagan” Neoplatonism. His attempted synthesis of Hellenism and Christianity was unique, unlike that of any other late antique Christian Platonist. Later, Renaissance thinkers scanned a new religious horizon reviving Hellenic Neoplatonism, Hermetic thought, Pythagoreanism, etc., included in a “primordial revelation,” contemporaneous with the Mosaic revelation and thereby in harmony with Christianity. In Romantic-era England, Thomas Taylor revived Hellenic Neoplatonism as the “true” religion, in the spirit of the anti-Christian theurgic Neoplatonist Roman emperor, Julian. Taylor had a significant influence on the American “Synesii,” Transcendentalists and Neoplatonists, e.g., on Bronson Alcott’s Platonic/Pythagorean lifestyle. Reading Taylor’s translations, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of the “Trismegisti” whose Neoplatonic religion predated and superseded “parvenu” Christianity. Later Transcendentalists continued the work of Taylor, sympathizing with late antique “pagan” Neoplatonism, but, in the spirit of Synesius, synthesizing it with Christianity and with other religions. They sought a non-sectarian, universal “cosmic theism,” notably through Thomas M. Johnson’s journal, The Platonist, which included translations of Synesius and other Neoplatonists. One of its contributors, Alexander Wilder, also influenced Theosophy on its Neoplatonic side. More recent Anglophone “Synesii” include Hilary Armstrong, who was a major presence in Neoplatonic scholarship, both in the uk and North America. He argued for a return to Hellenic inclusive monotheism, in which a Christian Platonist, like himself, could also venerate Hindu or Isis’ holy images as being true reflections of the divine.
23
Stauffer, Andrew M. "Robert Browning and “The King is Cold”: A New Poem." Victorian Literature and Culture 26, no. 2 (1998): 465–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150300002515.
Full textAbstract:
By February of 1858, the American abolitionist community had at least twice been exposed to a poem — attributed to Robert Browning — entitled “The King is Cold.” It appeared in January in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a weekly newspaper published in New York City, and, one month later, it was reprinted in William Garrison's Boston paper, the Liberator. Yet aside from this brief record of publication, the poem has left no discernible traces, either before or since. The oddly one-sided (i.e., American) appearances of “The King is Cold” surely contributed to its being overlooked by generations of Browning scholars and editors, including such modern fugitive-hunters as Broughton, Honan, and Kelley. In fact, with a few notable exceptions, Browning scholarship has been reluctant to extend its efforts across the Atlantic. We still await an analysis of the poet's American transactions that would update the important research done by Louise Greer in the 1950s. For most of his life, Browning was much more popular in the United States than in England, and, as Greer puts it, “Browning must have known more Americans than any other English man of letters” (39). And, although their author never visited the United States, Browning's poems arrived by the 1840s, finding enthusiastic audiences that included such luminaries as Hawthorne, Lowell, Emerson, and Thomas Higginson. This Boston intellectual clique — transcendentalist, Unitarian, and abolitionist — recognized in Robert (and, more rapidly, in Elizabeth Barrett) the “brave translunary things that our first poets had” (Lowell qtd. in Greer 14). As the uncatalogued existence of “The King is Cold” suggests, the fruits of this special relationship remain incompletely gathered.
24
Vargas-Cetina, Gabriela, and Manpreet Kaur Kang. "Cosmopolitanism, Translocality, Astronoetics: A Multi-Local Vantage Point." Review of International American Studies 13, no. 2 (December 31, 2020): 29–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.31261/rias.9804.
Full textAbstract:
The world in which we live is crisscrossed by multiple flows of people, information, non-human life, travel circuits and goods. At least since the Sixteenth Century, the Americas have received and generated new social, cultural and product trends. As we see through the case studies presented here, modern literature and dance, the industrialization of food and the race to space cannot be historicized without considering the role the Americas, and particularly the United States, have played in all of them. We also see, at the same time, how these flows of thought, art, science and products emerged from sources outside the Americas to then take root in and beyond the United States. The authors in this special volume are devising conceptual tools to analyze this multiplicity across continents and also at the level of particular nations and localities. Concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality and astronoetics are brought to shed light on these complex crossings, giving us new ways to look at the intricacy of these distance-crossing flows. India, perhaps surprisingly, emerges as an important cultural interlocutor, beginning with the idealized, imagined versions of Indian spirituality that fueled the romanticism of the New England Transcendentalists, to the importance of Indian dance pioneers in the world stage during the first part of the twentieth century and the current importance of India as a player in the race to space.
25
Vargas-Cetina, Gabriela, and Manpreet Kaur Kang. "Cosmopolitanism, Translocality, Astronoetics: A Multi-Local Vantage Point." Review of International American Studies 13, no. 2 (December 31, 2020): 29–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.31261/rias.9804.
Full textAbstract:
The world in which we live is crisscrossed by multiple flows of people, information, non-human life, travel circuits and goods. At least since the Sixteenth Century, the Americas have received and generated new social, cultural and product trends. As we see through the case studies presented here, modern literature and dance, the industrialization of food and the race to space cannot be historicized without considering the role the Americas, and particularly the United States, have played in all of them. We also see, at the same time, how these flows of thought, art, science and products emerged from sources outside the Americas to then take root in and beyond the United States. The authors in this special volume are devising conceptual tools to analyze this multiplicity across continents and also at the level of particular nations and localities. Concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality and astronoetics are brought to shed light on these complex crossings, giving us new ways to look at the intricacy of these distance-crossing flows. India, perhaps surprisingly, emerges as an important cultural interlocutor, beginning with the idealized, imagined versions of Indian spirituality that fueled the romanticism of the New England Transcendentalists, to the importance of Indian dance pioneers in the world stage during the first part of the twentieth century and the current importance of India as a player in the race to space.
26
Bain, Theodore. "Educating New England: The Pedagogical Experiments of the American Transcendentalists. FranziskaSchmid. American Studies Monograph Series, Vol. 291. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press, 2018." Journal of American Culture 43, no. 2 (June 2020): 165–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13171.
Full text
27
Lacerda, José Augusto Duarte. "Non-Teleology." Per Musi, no. 38 (May 2, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.35699/2317-6377.2018.5235.
Full textAbstract:
In 1836, inspired by the writings of the German philosopher Imannuel Kant and disillusioned withUnitarianism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and others founded the Transcendentalist Club in Concord, MA. TheTranscendentalists defended Kant’s notion that knowledge was innate and believed that all lives emanated divinity, being bonded through a kind of universal soul. The writings of the Transcendentalists arguably helped shape the New England consciousness. Although composer Stuart Saunders Smith was born more than one hundred years after Transcendentalism’s heyday, as a New Englander, his life has been immersed in a culture that inherited values that trace back to this movement. This essay explores one of the movement’s principal features: the avoidance of teleology (i.e. goal-oriented thinking). Non-teleology is reflected in his music through his recent tendency of writing evening-length pieces, his frequent references to New England imagery, his disregard of form, his use of repetitions, his use of non-sequiturs, and his incursions of modality. The Starving Month for solo vibraphone, analyzed in the final section of this essay, presents all aforementioned characteristics.
28
-, Sakshi Tyagi. "The Impact of Eastern philosophy and Thought on American Poets." International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research 5, no. 5 (October 22, 2023). http://dx.doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2023.v05i05.7834.
Full textAbstract:
Many American poets of the 19th and 20th centuries were influenced by Eastern philosophy. Poets embraced oriental thought & spirituality. These themes are reflected in their poetry through symbolism, references and imagery. These poets find peace, solace and shelter in eastern philosophy. They searched immensely for the solution to their problems but found materialism and brokenness. T.S.Eliot, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau expressed their views which resonate with eastern philosophy and spirituality. T.S. Eliot found peace in the Upanishad and the teachings of the Bhagvad Gita. One should practice the triad Da Da Da as proposed by T.S. Eliot in his Magnum opus “The Waste Land”. Walt Whitman was not a preacher of the Hindu religion but his poetry echoes oriental philosophy and ideas like non-dualism, transcendentalism, self-reliance interconnectedness, universal soul and rejection of materialism. Whitman integrated oriental and Western thought. These writers weave above mentioned themes in their verses. Henry David Thoreau wants to lead the life of a recluse through his essay Walden. Walden is the product of Henry David Thoreau's life experiments. He chooses life in the woods over materialism and wants other Americans to follow the same path. Gandhi was greatly influenced by Walden. In Walden, Thoreau advocates a life of simplicity and self-reliance. Walden is made into many chapters, each part describing one or the other aspects of simple and common life. Thoreau’s ideas on life are divided into different chapters such as economy, life, reading, solitude, the village, the ponds and higher laws. Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American poet and essayist and was one of the members of a group of New England idealists known as transcendentalists. He magically weaved God, nature and individuals into one whole. Emerson says that prayer is the disease of the soul as a creed is the disease of the intellect. He proposes that one should not pray to beg for worldly pleasures. He also puts forth that one should not travel as travel is not the food of the soul.
29
Duarte Lacerda, José Augusto. "The poetry of being Present! An analysis of Transcendental thought in the work of Stuart Saunders Smith." Revista Música Hodie 19 (May 30, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5216/mh.v19.52703.
Full textAbstract:
New England composer Stuart Saunders Smith (1948) is immersed in a milieu that echoes the American Transcendentalist movement. Transcendentalist figures, like Emerson and Thoreau, discussed notions also emphasized by Smith’s: autonomy, intuition, experience, self-reliance, self-actualization, pacifism, and a claim that each person is part of a single universal spirit—Oneness.
This article focuses on how such notions reflect in Smith’s compositional process and how two particular aspects, pacifism and Oneness, reflect in the music that emerges from this process. In Smith’s compositional process, experience, “filtered” through intuition, is more important than pre-compositional systems. Therefore, his work is seen as antithetical to formalism. Oneness is achieved by leveling the roles of composer, performer, and audience. This procedure appears particularly in his trans-media systems, mobile compositions, and co-existence pieces. Pacifism emerges in his use of intricate rhythms. These stances suggest Smith’s music as part of a lineage of thought that traces back to the Transcendentalists: the idea of facing tradition critically while upholding free agency as the primary source of artistic creation.
30
Woods, Benjamin. "A “Defect of Justice”: Congregationalism, the Calvinist Problem, and the Unitarian Solution in Sylvester Judd's Margaret." Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship 1 (2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.46428/btm.1.2.
Full textAbstract:
This article contributes to a small body of criticism concerning Sylvester Judd’s 1845 novel Margaret. Largely described as a “Transcendentalist” novel that critiques the Calvinist theology prevalent in late-eighteenth-early-nineteenth century New England village society, I argue for an interpretation of the novel that is concerned the interaction between Calvinism and the Congregationalist model of social and religious organization over time. Rather than just exposing the negative social ramifications Calvinist doctrines like total depravity can have on New England society, I assert that the novel exposes the limitations in Puritan Congregationalist ideals espoused by early figures such as John Winthrop through the example of Livingston. The new Unitarian-congregationalist model Livingston adopts in discarding Calvinism suggests Judd’s resolute faith in Winthrop’s original Congregationalist mission. Judd does not imagine a radical Utopia, but instead offers a more pragmatic reform that is fundamentally Unitarian in its emphasis on humanity's essential goodness and limitless capacity for moral improvement.
31
Woods, Benjamin. "A “Defect of Justice”: Congregationalism, the Calvinist Problem, and the Unitarian Solution in Sylvester Judd's Margaret." Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship 1 (2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.46428/btm1.2.
Full textAbstract:
This article contributes to a small body of criticism concerning Sylvester Judd’s 1845 novel Margaret. Largely described as a “Transcendentalist” novel that critiques the Calvinist theology prevalent in late-eighteenth-early-nineteenth century New England village society, I argue for an interpretation of the novel that is concerned the interaction between Calvinism and the Congregationalist model of social and religious organization over time. Rather than just exposing the negative social ramifications Calvinist doctrines like total depravity can have on New England society, I assert that the novel exposes the limitations in Puritan Congregationalist ideals espoused by early figures such as John Winthrop through the example of Livingston. The new Unitarian-congregationalist model Livingston adopts in discarding Calvinism suggests Judd’s resolute faith in Winthrop’s original Congregationalist mission. Judd does not imagine a radical Utopia, but instead offers a more pragmatic reform that is fundamentally Unitarian in its emphasis on humanity's essential goodness and limitless capacity for moral improvement.
32
Byer, Tia. "Creative Agency in The Scarlet Letter." FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts, no. 30 (July 21, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/forum.30.4477.
Full textAbstract:
This article provides a critical analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s employment of artistic defiance in The Scarlet Letter. In reading Hester Prynne’s artistic ability and theological dissent as tools of creative resistance, the article claims that Hawthorne uses self-expression to critique Puritan values. When Hester redesigns the symbol of the scarlet letter A that she is forced to wear as a punishment for the sin of committing adultery, the act of sewing becomes a transgressive form of resistance. By examining the way in which she transforms her symbol of shame into an expression of autonomy, I trace the spiritual significance of Hester’s resistance and Hawthorne’s statement of individualism as reflecting the Transcendentalist rhetoric of early nineteenth-century New England. Hester’s ability to transcend institutional authority to create an independent identity, in turn, cultivates an independent relationship with God. Finally, I read Hawthorne’s own parallel creative struggle as author as a metaphor for national independent identity that can be contextualised within the American Renaissance.