Freaks of Nature: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists

Catalog description

Who were the Transcendentalists--and who cares? This course focuses on American literature's obsessions with Nature in the decades before the Civil War. Reading in Emerson's essays and Thoreau's autobiography Walden, we will read in a wide array of writers associated with the Transcendentalist movement, as well as those who opposed and satirized them. Our readings include spiritual narratives, essays, lyric poetry, antislavery writings, and include Margaret Fuller and Frederick Douglass among others. It will introduce students to Romantic literature and culture, sentimentalism, the search for absolute and universal truths, the role of the professional author, and the ideal of artistic genius.