Wednesday, 10/5 - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Wednesday, 10/5

Transcendentalism, Thoreau & Dark Romanticism

Welcome to October – Time to turn it up a notch!!!!Slide2

Thoreau Re-Cap

How did the two biographical pieces differ?

Did you talk about this yesterday? Why not?How did the excerpts from Walden reflect Thoreau’s life? Did you talk about this yesterday? Why not?Take your notes from yesterday, meet in your fruit groups, and talk it out. You have 7-10 minutes!Slide3

Transcendentalism

Key TenetsSlide4

Key Tenets of Transcendentalism

In Nature, we are able to "transcend" the truths we know in the Natural world

. In other words, Transcendentalists believe in things they cannot see or touch or feel.Nature is our source to experience these truths. So things like

meditation

can bring us to truths that we never would have experienced

using only our five senses.

Materialism is bad.

Striving for material goods was seen as worthless and an unhealthy pursuit. It was totally superficial and can only lead to corruption. Slide5

Key Tenets of Transcendentalism

Society is the source of corruption

. If we are all to follow our own free will and listen to our hearts, we would be much better off. Societal/governmental norms and rules are counterintuitive.Our intuition and natural instincts guide us to do the right things

.

In nature, we are uncorrupted. It is only when we let society in that we start to conform and hence, be corrupted.Slide6

Key Tenets of Transcendentalism

Conformity is wrong

.We should NOT follow the crowd. We should make our own way and our own decisions in this world in order to truly embrace our uncorrupted intuition. The nature of human beings is good

.

Again, it is society that corrupts us. Human beings left to their own devices are good.Slide7

Dark Romanticism

A Reaction to The Transcendentalist MovementSlide8

Let’s Talk About…Dark Romanticism!Slide9

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door."

'Tis

some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door—

Only this and nothing more."

From "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)Slide10

Dark Romanticism/Gothic

Dark Romanticism's birth was a mid-nineteenth-century reaction to the American Romanticism & Transcendentalism…

A STARK CONTRAST!Authors like Poe, Hawthorne and Melville, found base Romantic and Transcendental beliefs far too optimistic and egotistical and reacted by modifying them in their prose and poetry.Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein

defined European dark romanticism, often referred to as gothic.

American dark romanticism was defined by the works of Edgar Allan Poe.Slide11

Characteristics

The grotesque, the gloomy, the morbid, the fantastic-the American Dark Romantics embraced all of these illogical elements and shaped them into perhaps the most popular sub-genre of American literature.

While the Romantics believed reality to be pale and empty, the Dark Romantics thought quite the opposite. Life to the Dark Romantics was colorful, capricious, and contradictory. Slide12

Comparing & Contrasting The Romantics

Unlike the Romantics, the Dark Romantics acknowledged the evil of man and the horror of evil.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had ignored the depravity of man, sin and Calvinist predestination, and the Dark Romantics stood to remind the world of the existence of evil. Like the Romantics and Transcendentalists, however, the Dark Romantics valued intuition and emotion over logic and reason and saw symbols, spiritual truths, and signs in nature and everyday events.Slide13

Further Contradictions

We can find spiritual facts directly in nature, but those facts aren’t necessarily good- in fact, generally evil

Not all evil comes from man- there is evil (and how!) in the “Divine Soul”Thus, self-reflection and “transcendence” is as likely to reveal evil as well as good.Dark Romantics are fascinated with evil, madness, murder, and deathSlide14

The Gothic Tradition – American Style

In Europe, Dark Romantics fascinated with creepy old castles, crypts, tombs, etc. which is reflected in American DR

The key figures of Dark Romanticism included Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But America is a young country, so…Poe- based stories in Gothic European settingsHawthorne- resurrected old Historical (Puritan) boogeyman(Original sin, Puritan angst, shame, etc) Melville- pitted men vs. unknowable natureSlide15

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the psychological thriller and an American pop-culture icon, wrote such popular works as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Cask of Amontillado."

His mystery stories, "The Purloined Letter" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" paved the way for the modern detective story, and inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes and Fyodor Dostoevsky to examine the criminal mind in Crime and Punishment (1866).