Transcript Kambriel: Rappaccini's Daughter Veil

Beneath the American Renaissance
Literature, Painting, and Sensational Culture in the Age of
Emerson and Hawthorne
HS 32 151 (Blockseminar)
PD Dr. Stefan Brandt
John F. Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien
WS 2006/07
Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains: Lander‘s Peak (1863)
What will we do today?
• Credit requirements and formal matters
• Brief introduction to the topic
• Go through our syllabus
• Look for experts for each session
Stefan Brandt
• Graduation from Kennedy-Institute in 1996
• Dissertation on Turn-of-the-Century American literature
and culture (1890-1914)
• Habilitationsschrift (2003): The Culture of Corporeality –
Aesthetic Experience and the Embodiment of America,
1945-1960
Credit requirements
• Regular attendance & thoughtful participation in
class
40%
• Expert session
20%
• Final paper (17-20 pages long)
40%
Course reader
Available at: Copy-shop «Kopierservice» at Königin-Luise-Str. 39;
opening hours: Mon-Fri, 8-20, Sat 9-14, Tel 832-6606
Additional texts:
Library of the John F. Kennedy-Institute, Handapparat 24
Shake hands!
What Is the «American Renaissance» ?
F.O.Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941)
- Period of intense flourishing of American literature roughly between 1830 and 1865
Why «Renaissance»?
a. « Rebirth » of American writing – accentuation of themes and
idioms that were considered «specifically American»
- American landscape
- the «frontier»
- the legacy of American history (New
World vs. Old World)
- the nature of democracy
- a fresh awareness of America‘s
place in the world
b. Borrowings of American writers of
that era from the Elizabethans,
particularly Shakespeare
- e.g., Melville‘s Moby-Dick (1851)
(scenes, characters)
Genealogy of a concept
The starting point for this book was my realization
of how great a number of our past masterpieces
were produced in one extraordinarily concentrated
moment of expression. It may not seem precisely
accurate to refer to our mid-nineteenth century as
a re-birth; but that was how the writers
themselves judged it. Not as a re-birth of values
that had existed previously in America, but as
America’s way of producing a renaissance, by
coming to its first maturity and affirming its
rightful heritage in the whole expanse of art and
culture.
F.O. Matthiessen,
American Renaissance (1941)
America’s coming-of-age
There is a moment in the history of every nation,
when, proceeding out of this brute youth, the
perceptive powers reach their ripeness […]; so
that man […] extends across the entire scale, and,
with his feet still planted on the immense forces of
night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar
and stellar creation. That is the moment of adult
health, the culmination of power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Representative Men (1850)
America -Center of equal daughters, equal sons
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love.
Walt Whitman (1855)
The last two lines, not in the recording:
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.
What Is the «American Renaissance» ?
Who
Literary genre?
- rejection of rationalism and materialism
- primacy of the imagination
- importance of individuality and personal freedom
- value of spontaneity and self-expression
Romanticism
Transcendentalism / «helle Romantik»
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Walt Whitman
Negative Romanticism / «dunkle Romantik»
Herman Melville
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Trust men and they will be true
to you; treat them greatly and
they will show themselves great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
God help the poor fellow who
squares his life according to this.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
What Is the «American Renaissance» ?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Walt Whitman
Herman Melville
Nathaniel Hawthorne
What Is «Beneath the American Renaissance» ?
David S. Reynolds
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Walt Whitman
Herman Melville
Nathaniel Hawthorne
What Is «Beneath the American Renaissance» ?
David S. Reynolds
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Walt Whitman
Herman Melville
Nathaniel Hawthorne
What Lies «Beneath the American Renaissance» ?
David S. Reynolds
To delve beneath the American Renaissance
involves two methodological approaches:
1. discovery of «forgotten» texts and writings by
authors not enumerated by Matthiessen
2. analysis of the connection between high culture and
popular culture
The truly indigenous American literary texts were produced
mainly by those who had opened sensitive ears to a large
variety of popular cultural voices.
D.S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, p.5
Edgar Allen Poe
Frederick Douglass
Susan Warner
Emily Dickinson
1. discovery of «forgotten» texts, particularly by authors
not enumerated by Matthiessen
2. analysis of the connection between high culture and
popular culture
Edgar Allen Poe
Frederick Douglass
Susan Warner
Emily Dickinson
1. discovery of «forgotten» texts, particularly by authors
not enumerated by Matthiessen
2. analysis of the connection between high culture and
popular culture
sensationalism
->
landscape
painting
The Hudson River School
(ca. 1825-1875)
Thomas Cole, The Present (1838)
Thomas Cole, Schroon Lake (1838-1840)
Thomas Cole, View on the Catskill Early (1837)
Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits (1849)
(showing painter Thomas Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant in a Catskills landscape)
Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight in the Wilderness (1860)
John Frederick Kensett, Mount Madison (1873)
John Frederick Kensett, Mount Washington (1851)
Tenets of the Hudson River School
- a romantic image of America in the 19th century (the
nation as landscape)
- pastoral settings (human beings and nature coexist in
harmony, nature appears innocent)
- the origins of the USA are inscribed into the
landscape (Washington, Madison)
- use of a highly realistic style (no visible
brushstrokes), effects of light in landscape
(-> luminism)
Syllabus