JD Isip Franklin, Emerson, Whitman, and the American Bible 2012 (original) (raw)
European Journal of American Culture, 2009
This article begins with a brief consideration of the resurgence of religious rhetoric as currently used by George W. Bush. It discusses this alongside what Harold Bloom terms an 'authentic American religion' in his article, 'Reflections in the Evening Land' (December 17, 2005). Bloom looks retrospectively at Emersonian self-reliance as the 'authentic American religion' and he urges contemporary American readers to remember this as a truly American religion. An exploration of this apparent correlation between self-reliance and an authentic American religion uncovers the somewhat unnoticed influence of William Blake's poetry on Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays. A close analysis of Emerson's early reading of Blake beside a consideration of Blake's 'London' (1794), 'The Clod and the Pebble' (1794) and Emerson's 'Self-Reliance' (1841) and 'Society and Solitude' (1870) documents the development of Emersonian self-reliance into a more assured term. This is accounted for by Emerson's growing interest and immersion in the poetry of this English poet, William Blake. The article concludes, contentiously, with the declaration that it is only through this transatlantic study of Blake's and Emerson's writing that Bloom's 'authentic American religion' can really be understood. Self-reliance in contemporary America In 2005, Harold Bloom published an article in The Guardian entitled 'Reflections in the Evening Land'. The article was written in response to the politics of the Christian Right in the United States, and in particular to George W. Bush's version of Christianity that seemed to be sweeping across the States at the time. As Bush and the Christian Right latterly preach a new gospel, which differs from European Christianity, Bloom notes that it is 'the religiosity of the country [the United States], which truly divides us into two nations' (Bloom 2005: 4), namely the Christian Right and those who study them, the intellectual Left. As the United States faces a postbellum split, Bloom heralds Whitman as a prophet and preacher of nineteenth-century America's 'religion' of self-reliance (referring to Whitman as a 'more positive Emersonian') and urges the reader to remember this as 'the authentic 75
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature”: A Transcendentalist’s Call for Nationalistic Literature
2023
In the wake of the Revolutionary War American writers were eager to partake in the establishment of a national identity, one free of imposing governmental and religious institutions seeking conformity and acquiescence of the mind. The collective literary works of the American Renaissance – referred to by some as the “richest period” (Reynolds) in American literature - championed individualism, idealism, and the divinity of nature as the principal characteristics of the burgeoning country’s populace. Steadfast in his pursuit of establishing a distinctly American identity, Ralph Waldo Emerson requisitioned the need for nationalistic literature that represented principal characteristics defined by the fledgling nation. With the release of his renown essay “Nature” , Emerson emphasized the importance of a nationalistic literature, and fortified the foundational concepts of the transcendental movement that were carried within the extensive literary works of the American Renaissance.
2005
America in the 19th century was a nation that struggled with divisiveness in its population. Race and class differences were two central points of division in a country that would endure debates over slavery, contrasting industrial and agrarian lives, chasms between the wealthy and the poor, and racial prejudice and conflict— all of which would contribute to the Civil War. Walt Whitman saw the need for unification and sought to become the “Poet of America” who could unite the various divisions of the United States through his poetry. Whitman’s preface to his original, 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass called the U.S. “the greatest poem,” and lauded the tenets of democracy and equality extended to all peoples wishing to live within its borders. For America to fulfill its great potential, a culture of unity and nationalism would need to be imparted on the people, something that could happen, Whitman hoped, through his poetry. This study examines the evolution of nationalism as a concept, and various manifestations of nationalism in Europe and America. The tendency of nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries to devolve into colonialism led the idea of nationalism to become suspect at times. The potential, then, is to use Whitman’s ideals of equality and enthusiasm for democracy to construct a Post-imperial Nationalism which maintains domestic patriotism without mutating into jingoistic colonialism. Whitman’s question, “Who need be afraid of the merge?” in 1855’s “Song of Myself” challenges the reader to accept the merging of the varied cultures and backgrounds of America into a single, unified American race. Throughout Leaves of Grass, Whitman demonstrates the characteristics of an American living within his idea of this nationalistic “merge.” He celebrates the optimistic, the nature-loving, the egalitarian, and the working-class with deep reverence— creating a kind of “Blue-collar Romanticism,” that can function as the ethos of a unified America. Whitman’s vision is clouded, however, by contradictions within himself and within America. Both poet and nation were unable to fully move beyond the limitations of racial prejudice that were rampant in the 19th century. While Whitman openly wished to see slavery ended, he could not rectify the presence of blacks— nor Native Americans— in his vision of America’s future. Similarly, the United States spoke of equality, yet struggled to extend full civil rights to blacks, even after slavery was abolished. Ultimately, this study concludes that it is feasible to use Whitman’s poetry as a starting point for the creation of a unifying American identity. As America’s “experiment” in democracy in 1776 led to a world in which similar democracies are considered the norm, the country can now serve as a model for both unity and a Post-imperial Nationalism which does not seek to enhance itself through the oppression of others, but through domestic perfecting.
Beginning the World over Again: Past and Future in American Nationalism
Nations and their Histories, 2009
The theme of this book, history and the formation of national identity, goes to the heart of a debate that has framed our understanding of the origin and meaning of nationalism for the past two decades or more. The prevailing argument has been that nations are inventions of the modern age and that they rest their case for nationhood upon false claims to deep historic origins. The 'modernist' argument tells us nationalism involves 'imagined communities' that rest on 'invented traditions', fabricated historic myths, legends and heroes, all concocted to create an aura of legitimacy through historic perpetuity. Nationalist historical consciousness, according to the modernists, insinuates itself in the banalities of everyday life: national holidays, statues, memorials, the names of streets and plazas, history lessons in school, and through literature, art, music, all aimed at creating a popular illusion of eternal national distinction and magnificence. The historical narrative resulting from the deliberate efforts by nationalist elites is one that casts the nation as the natural expression of a people with origins deep in the past and a future without end. Because most modernists see nationalism as a pernicious force, they see their task as exposing the historical fallacies that underpin it. Ernest Renan's (1882) prescient lecture, 'What is a Nation?', anticipated the modernist critique of the role of history in forging national identity when he observed: 'Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality'. When Eric Hobsbawm (1990) offered his blunt summary of Renan's point-'getting its history wrong is part of being a nation'-he captured perfectly the modernists' derision towards the historical claims for nationhood.
American Exceptionalism A Double Edged Sword
The Washington Post, 2014
Born out of revolution, the United States is a country organized around an ideology which includes a set of dogmas about the nature of a good society. Americanism, as different people have pointed out, is an "ism" or ideology in the same way that communism or fascism or liberalism are isms. As G. K. Chesterton put it: "America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.. . ." As noted in the Introduction, the nation's ideology can be described in five words: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissezfaire. The revolutionary ideology which became the American Creed is liberalism in its eighteenth-and nineteenth-century meanings, as distinct from conservative Toryism, statist communitarianism, mercantilism, and noblesse oblige dominant in monarchical, state-church-formed cultures. Other countries' senses of themselves are derived from a common history. Winston Churchill once gave vivid evidence to the difference between a national identity rooted in history and one defined by ideology in objecting to a proposal in 1940 to outlaw the anti-war Communist Party. In a speech in the House of Commons, Churchill said that as far as he knew, the Communist Party was composed of Englishmen and he did not fear an Englishman. In Europe, nationality is related to community, and thus one cannot become un-English or un-Swedish. Being an American, however, is an ideological commitment. It is not a matter of birth. Those who reject American values are un-American. The American Revolution sharply weakened the noblesse oblige, hierarchically rooted, organic community values which had been linked to Tory sentiments, and enormously strengthened the individualistic, egalitarian, and anti-statist ones which had been present in the settler and religious background of the colonies. These values were evident in the twentieth-century fact that, as H. G. Wells pointed out close to ninety years ago, the United States not only has lacked a viable socialist party, but also has never developed a British or European-type Conservative or Tory party. Rather, America has been dominated by pure bourgeois, middle-class individualistic values. As Wells put it: "Essentially America is a middle-class [which has] become a community and so its essential problems are the problems of a modern individualistic society, stark and clear." He enunciated a theory of America as a liberal society, in the classic anti-statist meaning of the term: It is not difficult to show for example, that the two great political parties in America represent only one English party, the middle-class Liberal party.. .. There are no Tories. .. and no Labor Party.. .. [T]he new world [was left] to the Whigs and Nonconformists and to those less constructive, less logical, more popular and liberating thinkers who became Radicals in England, and Jeffersonians and then Democrats in America.
The Romantic Era of the mid-19th century introduced America to its first distinct form of national literature that brought worldwide recognition to its prominent authors and their works. Yet for hundreds of years prior the continent produced various literary styles that emanated from native tribes and European explorers to revolutionary heroes and leaders, culminating in a vast treasure trove of history that stood as a precursor to what lay ahead. The natives of North America, absent of their own written vocabularies, passed down their histories, tales, myths and legends to their younger generations by word of mouth. Later, European settlers, after sailing across the vast Atlantic Ocean and reaching the shores of the North American continent, would write their own accounts of their findings and eventually decipher and translate the native’s stories into the myriad languages of the western and non-western world. Late 18th century American literature would be full of patriotic fervor from the writings of Thomas Paine, who would help rally General George Washington’s troops and bring new energy and hope to the American cause of independence and freedom. By the early 19th century, and after a second conflict with England, the nascent American nation was ready to sink its teeth into a newly-found national literature that would introduce the Romantic Era while its prominent authors would write about heroic hard-fought battles for democracy, the vast frontiers, and imaginative spine-tingling tales. It would be nature, though, in all of its resplendent boundless natural beauty, wonder and immensity, from sea to shining sea, that would provide the inspiration and impetus for two literary giants of this era, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, to let their imaginations flourish with wild creative abandon and to capture, on paper for the first time, the personal sentiments that made man recognize its eternal bond with the natural world and at long last give American’s their own literary genre that spoke to their affinity for the land and a nation they were proud to call home.
A Tale of Two Anti-Americanisms
European journal of American studies, 2007
There is, of course no single American tradition or single American set of values. There are, and always have been, many Americas. We each of us remember and appeal to the Americas we prefer. Immanuel Wallerstein What does the term mean? That you're anti-jazz? Or that you're opposed to free speech? That you don't delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean that you don't admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans? Arundhati Roy Although most Americans may be largely ignorant of what was, and still is, being done in their names, all are likely to pay a steep priceindividually and collectively-for their nation's continued efforts to dominate the global scene.
American Transcendentalism doc 1
Despire the claims of some American linguists, the American language doesn't exist. So, from a theoretical point of view, American literature shouldn't exist too. But the dilemma, whether a separate literature can exist without a separate language and to what extent the state borders can determine to which literary tradition a writer belongs, is present all around the world. For example, Samuel Beckett was born an Irishman, sometimes wrote in English and sometimes in French, and later translated his works into English. So, we have to admit that the idea of national literature is a rather nebulous notion and that the American literature does exist as a set of influences, themes and literary solutions different from those in Europe. At the end of the 1920s even the European cultural elite started to view American writing as separate from English literature and in 1930 the Nobel Prize for literature went to an American writer for the first time. Paradoxically, American writers who lived in Europe during the same period played a great role in the recognition of American literary particularity. Through their creative works, writers like Henry James, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, changed European literary perceptions of American literature for ever. One of the first expressions of this new European view of American literature appeared in interview by Andre Gide. He claims that American literature is different, even bizarre when compared to the European. The question appears -what are the differences and what are main characteristics of American literature?