Editor's Note
For nearly two decades, I’ve taught an undergraduate Honors Course at the University of Oklahoma built around the readings in Hollinger & Capper’s The American Intellectual Tradition. As part of LD Burnett’s series of posts rereading Hollinger & Capper, I’m doing a series of posts exploring what it’s like to teach the volumes in an undergraduate, honors setting. In my first post, I said a few general things about Perspectives on the American Experience: American Social Thought, the course (or actually courses) in which I use The American Intellectual Tradition. When I began this course, The American Intellectual Tradition was in its 3rd edition. Unless otherwise noted, I’ll be blogging about the most recent edition of the books, the 7th. In this fifth post in my series, I discuss teaching Volume I, Part Four, entitled “Romantic Intellect and Cultural Reform.” For more on Volume I, Part Four, see LD’s post from last Saturday. I’ll be blogging about a new section every two weeks as LD works her way through the book. I am not attempting to make these posts a comprehensive description of what I do with Hollinger & Capper in the classroom. Instead, I will be highlighting an aspect of my approach to each section. Please feel free to use the discussion thread for more general comments or questions about teaching this particular part of The American Intellectual Tradition.
The Grave of Henry David Thoreau as Living Text
At the heart of Volume I, Part Four, of The American Intellectual Tradition is Transcendentalism, though for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, Hollinger & Capper have decided to keep that word out of its title.
As LD Burnett suggests in her piece on this section of The American Intellectual Tradition, teaching the Transcendentalists can be especially enjoyable and rewarding. They’re intrinsically historically important. They’re fun to read. And they inevitably awaken strong responses from my students. Which is not to say that my students universally like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Branson Alcott, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, whose works appear in this section. Rather, the texts divide my students as they’ve divided American audiences for the better part of two centuries. Some see in Emerson and Thoreau a new, bracing individualism that is unlike anything we encounter before it in the course. But others see them as writing a kind of airy nonsense.
Many students latch on to the emphasis on experience, self-reliance, autonomy, and non-conformity. But most have a hard time taking seriously Emerson’s claims – in “Self-Reliance” (1841)– that travel is a waste of time or that social progress is an impossibility:
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. . . Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them. (411-412)
Margaret Fuller, from whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) they read a selection, has always spoken to my students as a living text. But in recent years, her understanding of masculinity and femininity has particularly struck them. Fuller argues that:
Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. These is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman. (432)
These days, my students often cite this passage in their short response papers as anticipating an understanding of trans identities.
Overall, one of the things that most marks teaching “Romantic Intellect and Cultural Reform” is that my students tend to read a lot of these texts first as living texts, which is unusual for their relationship to the materials in Volume I (though Franklin’s Autobiography and The Federalist Papers in Part Two have some of this quality, as well).
But one of the nice things about teaching these texts in the larger context of Volume I of Hollinger & Capper is that, by this point in the semester, the students are also able to come to an historical understanding of these texts. For example, since they’ve already read William Ellery Channing’s “Unitarian Christianity,” they have a sense of the rationalist brand of religion that erstwhile Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson is railing against in “The Divinity School Address” (1838). They’ve also already read George Bancroft’s “The Office of the People in Art, Government, and Religion,” in which Emerson’s fellow Bay Stater (Massachusetts is a bit overrepresented in this volume) argues that mass opinion is the best measure of artistic, political, and religious truth and that, over time, society gets closer and closer to the truth in all of these areas. This is such a diametrically opposite view from Emerson’s in “Self-Reliance” that the comparison inevitable leads to a good discussion.
One of the things I always make a point of reminding my students when we get to Part Four is that the time covered by Part Three of Volume I (which includes both the Channing and Bancroft readings) overlaps substantially with that covered by Part Four. Though the basic organization of The American Intellectual Tradition is chronological, the sections are also thematic. And students often gravitate to a kind of neo-Bancroftian understanding of history in which ideas progress over time and each section of Hollinger & Capper represents a simple step toward the modern world they know and (generally) love…though the Southern apologists for slavery that they will encounter in Section Five have a habit of disabusing them a bit of that particular misunderstanding. At any rate, the temporal overlap between sections of the volume, especially Parts Three and Four, is very important. The Transcendentalists argued with a lot of the ideas we’ve encountered earlier in the volume, but those ideas remained very powerful even as Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau wrote.
If Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau are three thinkers whose writings students tend to see as living texts, the same cannot be said as much about the other texts in Part Four: A. Bronson Alcott’s Conversations with Children on the Gospels, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s “Plan of the West Roxbury Community,” Horace Bushnell’s “Christian Nurture,” and Herman Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” But with the possible exception of the Bushnell, these works all tend very easily to produce interesting and productive class discussions…and even the (very un-Transcendentalist) Bushnell forms an interesting contrast with Alcott.
When I first taught this course with my former colleague Randy Lewis, we used to also have the students read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, which served as a kind of companion piece to both the Peabody reading (which is a non-fictional account of Brook Farm, the community of which Blithedale is a satire) and the Melville essay on Hawthorne. And the character of Zenobia in Blithedale is also based on Margaret Fuller. If I had an extra week – which thank goodness I don’t as our semesters are already too long – I’d return to teaching Blithedale as part of this course. It’s a wonderful book and it enriches the material of Part Four in very interesting ways.
These days, I find the Alcott reading particularly interesting to teach. Conversations with Children on the Gospels is, as its title suggests, a record of conversations between Alcott and children who attended his school. Alcott, like Emerson, believed that one’s deepest religious understandings could be found in one’s unspoiled intuitions. So he believed that the best form of Christian education was to have children read the Bible and then draw them out on their untutored understandings of it. All of this was recorded by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who eventually chastised Alcott for asking the children leading questions so that they will produce the answers that he wants. Alcott sheepishly admitted that she was right…and then printed that exchange in his book as well.
I spend two weeks on the materials in Part Four; we read Alcott, Emerson, and Peabody in the first week and Fuller, Thoreau, Bushnell, and Melville in the second.
One Thought on this Post
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I puzzled for a couple of minutes about all the pencils in front of Thoreau’s tomb, and then I remembered that he worked as, among other things, a pencil-maker.