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"I Speak For The Preservation Of The Union" : Daniel Webster, Law, And Morality In The Writings Of The American Renaissance, Rebecca Nicole Girardin
"I Speak For The Preservation Of The Union" : Daniel Webster, Law, And Morality In The Writings Of The American Renaissance, Rebecca Nicole Girardin
Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)
Daniel Webster, one of the most prominent politicians and orators in American history, effectively ended his political career on March 7th,1850. Webster’s support of the Compromise of 1850 included the Fugitive Slave Law, which forced Northern complicity in the return of captured fugitive slaves. Webster supported the legislation because he interpreted the law based on precedent and a notion of “natural law” determined by geography rather than morality. In this thesis, I look at how two writers of the American Renaissance, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe, used literature to critique the understanding of law promoted by Webster in …
Emerson's Idealist Poetics: Emerson, Rödl, And The Life Of Nature, Robert Darren Hutchinson
Emerson's Idealist Poetics: Emerson, Rödl, And The Life Of Nature, Robert Darren Hutchinson
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation, I articulate a hermeneutics for reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal text Nature through drawing on the insights of the contemporary philosopher Sebastian Rödl. Particularly, the performative, literary characteristics of Rödl’s quite conceptual work resonate with the poetic strategies that Emerson employs in Nature. In the section on the work of Rödl, I make the performative aspects of his philosophy explicit through a close reading of the way self-consciousness happens in his texts through the language he employs. Rödl refers to his elucidation of self-consciousness as idealism. In the section on Emerson, I show how Emerson’s project …
Poetic Possibilities: Poetry And Experience In Emerson, Nietzsche, And Freud, Amalia Astin
Poetic Possibilities: Poetry And Experience In Emerson, Nietzsche, And Freud, Amalia Astin
Senior Projects Fall 2017
Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.
The Pulpit's Muse: Conversive Poetics In The American Renaissance, Michael William Keller
The Pulpit's Muse: Conversive Poetics In The American Renaissance, Michael William Keller
Dissertations (1934 -)
This dissertation focuses on the interaction between poetic form and popular religious practice in the nineteenth century United States. Specifically, I aim to see how American poets appropriated religious tropes—and especially religious conversion—in their poetry with specific designs on their audience. My introduction analyzes the phenomenon of religious conversion up through the nineteenth century with help from psychologists and historians of religion, including William James and Sydney Ahlstrom. In the introduction, I also explore how revivalist conversion helped inform the poetics of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Chapter one focuses on Emerson’s poetry, particularly as it enacts Emerson’s poetic …
Committing To The Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments, Karinne Keithley Syers
Committing To The Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments, Karinne Keithley Syers
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Committing to the Waves: Emerson's Moving Assignments reads Ralph Waldo Emerson as a writer of assignments for living and working whose senses can be taken up across a wide array of creative and exploratory fields. Shifting between an interdisciplinary array of contexts ranging from philosophy and poetics to dance, performance, and somatic movement experiments, I join the practical sense of creative inquiry embodied in these fields to the abstract images of Emerson's assignments. I argue that Emerson's descriptions of intelligence and power, and so his approaches to navigating skepticism and loss, as well as the non-possessive sense of what "self" …
Discovering The "God Within": The Experience And Manifestation Of Emerson's Evolving Philosophy Of Intuition, Anne Tiffany Turner
Discovering The "God Within": The Experience And Manifestation Of Emerson's Evolving Philosophy Of Intuition, Anne Tiffany Turner
Theses and Dissertations
Investigating individual subjectivity, Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled to Europe following the death of his first wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, and his resignation from the Unitarian ministry. His experience before and during the voyage contributed to the evolution of a self-intuitive philosophy, termed selbstgefühl by the German Romantics and altered his careful style of composition and delivery to promote the integrity of individual subjectivity as the highest authority in the deduction of truth. He would use this philosophy throughout the remainder of his life to encourage his audience to experience the same process he did.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: From Buddhism To Transcendentalism, The Beginning Of An American Literary Tradition, Irene Jue
English
No abstract provided.
My Higher Self: Elizabeth Bishop And The Endurance Of Emerson, Joshua Andrew Mayo
My Higher Self: Elizabeth Bishop And The Endurance Of Emerson, Joshua Andrew Mayo
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
While there exists some scholarship affirming the aesthetic and intellectual connections between transcendentalism and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, there is to date no substantial study of what role Ralph Waldo Emerson singularly played in the inheritance of that tradition. This essay seeks to validate Emerson as Bishop's literary parentage, an influence that, though not immediately identifiable, greatly shaped her creative process. In so doing, it addresses the critical mistakes which have prevented a thorough discussion of Emerson's relevance and, moreover, negatively dominated the imagination of Bishop scholarship. As an exploration of the writers' shared iconography, their mutual metaphors, the …
Covenant Nation: The Politics Of Grace In Early American Literature, Justin M. Scott-Coe
Covenant Nation: The Politics Of Grace In Early American Literature, Justin M. Scott-Coe
CGU Theses & Dissertations
The argument of this dissertation is that a critical reading of the concept of "covenant" in early American writings is instrumental to understanding the paradoxes in the American political concepts of freedom and equality. Following Slavoj Zizek's theoretical approach to theology, I trace the covenant concept in early American literature from the theological expressions and disputes in Puritan Massachusetts through Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of Will and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, showing how the covenant theology of colonial New England dispersed into more "secular" forms of what may be called an American political theology. The first chapter provides an …
Terr(Or) Incognito : Unveiling Poe's Titanic Universe, Kraig Harry Odabashian
Terr(Or) Incognito : Unveiling Poe's Titanic Universe, Kraig Harry Odabashian
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This thesis investigates the role of dialectics in Edgar Allan Poe's fiction and prose. With particular attention to "Eureka" (1848), as well as "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1838) and Ligeia (1838/45), I argue that much of Poe's thought relies on theological sources including the writings of Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of John.
On The Brink Of The Waters Of Life And Truth, We Are Miserably Dying: Ralph Waldo Emerson As A Predecessor To Deconstruction And Postmodernism, Michael A. Deery
On The Brink Of The Waters Of Life And Truth, We Are Miserably Dying: Ralph Waldo Emerson As A Predecessor To Deconstruction And Postmodernism, Michael A. Deery
ETD Archive
Between his pivotal essays "Nature" in 1836 and "The Poet" in 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson's increasingly negative and distrustful view of language can best be described as a precursor to deconstruction and postmodernism. Contemporary critics are too quick to dismiss a deconstructionist Emerson. There is evidence within his major essays that Emerson's understanding of language not only leads him to public and private displays of pessimism, but also to feelings of internal solipsism, agnosticism, and epistemological anxiety. Emerson demanded that mankind should utilize nature and aesthetics to experience the sublime and an immediate and original relationship with God. Yet, Emerson's …
A Natural History Of The Mind : Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Michael Edmund Jonik
A Natural History Of The Mind : Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Michael Edmund Jonik
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This project examines how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American writers drew on European natural science and philosophy - specifically in terms of concepts of form, perception, and experience - to open new possibilities for thinking the relationship between the mind and the physical world. In each of the moments of American intellectual history here considered - the natural theology of Calvinism, the idealistic natural history of Transcendentalism, and the movement towards an evolutionary process-philosophy of Pragmatism - "place" becomes not only geographical location, but a dynamic field of interactions of natural historical, literary, theological, and philosophical knowledge. I trace this through …
Emersonian Perfectionism: A Man Is A God In Ruins, Brad James Rowe
Emersonian Perfectionism: A Man Is A God In Ruins, Brad James Rowe
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023
Ralph Waldo Emerson is a great American literary figure that began his career as a minister at Boston’s Second Church. He discontinued his ministry to become an essayist and lecturer and continued as such for the remainder of his life. This thesis was written with the intent of demonstrating that, in spite of leaving the ministry, Emerson continued to be religious and a religionist throughout his life and that he promulgated a unique religion based upon the principle of self-reliance. At the heart of Emerson’s religion of self-reliance is the doctrine of perfectionism, the infinite capacity of individuals. This thesis …
"A Kind Providence" And "The Right To Self Preservation": How Andrew Jackson, Emersonian Whiggery, And Frontier Calvinism Shaped The Course Of American Political Culture, Ryan Ruckel
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Andrew Jackson has inspired numerous biographies and works of historical scholarship, but his religious views have attracted very little attention. Jackson may have been a giant on the political landscape, but he was also a human being, an ordinary American who experienced the same difficulties and challenges as other Americans of the early nineteenth century. Another common experience for many Americans of Jackson’s day included church life, revivals, and efforts to conceptualize every day events within the context of religious experience. Finding out where Jackson stood on religion and what role religion played in his thinking helps situate him as …
The Path To Equilibrium: Melville, Emerson, And Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Ingrid D. Lelos
The Path To Equilibrium: Melville, Emerson, And Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Ingrid D. Lelos
Legacy ETDs
No abstract provided.