"Literature Class" [img]2012q1/ct_etoefm_etoeflistz_1268_20121[/img] [br] Accord

Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in a literature class.
Professor:
Today we’ll discuss Transcendentalism...Transcendentalism...which is a philosophical and literary  Q40
movement that developed in New England in the early nineteenth century. Transcendentalism began
with the formation in 1836 of the Transcendental Club in Boston, Massachusetts, by a group of artists
and writers. There’s evidence that the group was involved in somewhat of a protest against the
intellectual climate of Harvard. nterestingly enough, many of the Transcendentalists were actually Harvard
educated, but they never met in Cambridge. Remember, at this time Harvard had only eleven
professors, and at least eleven members could be expected to attend a meeting of the Transcendental Club.
So their intellectual community was large enough to rival the Harvard faculty.
    All right then Their criticism of Harvard was that the professors were too conservative and old  Q41
fashioned. Which, come to think of it, isn’t an unusuai attitude for students when they talk about their
professors. But, in fairness, the classroom method of recitation that was popular at Harvard required the
repetition of a lesson without any operational understanding of it. In contrast, the Transcendentalists
considered themselves modern and liberal because they preferred a more operational approach to
education. Bronson Alcott translated Transcendentalism into pedagogy by encouraging the students to
think, using dialogues and journals to develop and record their ideas. Language was viewed as the
connection between the individual and society. In 1834, Alcott established the Temple School near Boston
Commons and later founded a form of adult education, which he referred to as Conversation. This was
really a process whereby the give and take in a conversation became more important than the doctrine
that a teacher might have been inclined to pass on to students, an approach that stood in diametric
opposition to the tradition at Harvard that encouraged students to memorize their lessons.
    The Transcendental group also advanced a reaction against the rigid Puritanism of the period,  Q42
especially insofar as it emphasized society at the expense of the individual—the Puritans, I mean.
According to the Transcendentalists, the justification of all social organizations is the improvement of
the individual. So, in the literature of the time, the Transcendentalists insisted that it was basic human
nature to engage in self-expression, and many interpreted this as encouragement for them to write
essays and other opinion pieces. One of the most distinguished members of the club was Ralph Waldo
Emerson, who served as editor of the Transcendentalist’s literary magazine, the Dial. His writing
stressed the importance of the individual. In one of his best-known essays, "Self-Reliance," he appealed
to intuition as a source of ethics, asserting that people should be the judge of their own actions, without
the rigid restrictions of society. You can imagine the reaction of the church, in particular, the Unitarian
Church, in which many of the intellectuals held membership. If individuals were responsible for their own  Q43
code of ethics, then the clergy, and the entire!church organization was threatened.
    Perhaps because they were encouraged to think for themselves, the Transcendentalists came up
with several options for living out their philosophies. Many were devoted to the idea of a Utopian society
or at least to a pastoral retreat without class distinctions, where everyone would be responsible for
tending the gardens and maintaining the buildings, preparing the food, and so forth. And quite a few were
involved in some sort of communal living. Brook Farm was probably the most successful of these
cooperatives, although it lasted only six years. Brook Farm and some of the other experimental communities
brought to the surface the problem that the Transcendentalists faced when they tried to reconcile a
cooperative society and individual freedom. Both Emerson and Thoreau declined to participate in Brook
Farm because they maintained that improvement had to begin with an individual, not a group.
    From 1841 to 1843, Emerson and Thoreau lived and worked together in Emerson’s home,  
exchanging ideas, developing their philosophies, and writing. Upon leaving Emerson’s home, Thoreau built a
small cabin along the shores of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived alone for
two years. Devoting himself to the study of nature and to writing, he published an account of his  Q44
experiences in Walden, a book that’s generally acknowledged as the most original and sincere contribution to
literature by the Transcendentalists.
    But I’m getting ahead of myself. Transcendentalism didn’t change the educational system, and it
certainly didn’t reform the church in any significant way, but it did, in a sense, change the direction of
American social and political culture because Transcendentalism evolved from its initial literary roots  Q45
into a force that shaped the way a democratic society was interpreted on the NOrth American continent.