Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains: Lander‘s Peak (1863)

Beneath the American Renaissance

Literature, Painting, and Sensational Culture in the Age of Emerson and Hawthorne

HS 32 151 (Blockseminar)PD Dr. Stefan BrandtJohn F. Kennedy-Institut für

NordamerikastudienWS 2006/07

What will we do today?

• Brief introduction to the topic

• Go through our syllabus

• Credit requirements and formal matters

• Look for experts for each session

• 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

Stefan Brandt

Credit requirements

• Regular attendance & thoughtful participation in class

40%

• Expert session 20%

• Final paper (17-20 pages long)40%

Available at: Copy-shop «Kopierservice» at Königin-Luise-Str. 39; opening hours: Mon-Fri, 8-20, Sat 9-14, Tel 832-6606

Course reader

Library of the John F. Kennedy-Institute, Handapparat 24

Additional texts:

Shake hands!

F.O.Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941)

What Is the «American Renaissance» ? - 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)

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)

Genealogy of a concept

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’s coming-of-age

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)

America --

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,  Chair'd in the adamant of Time. 

The last two lines, not in the recording:

Henry David Thoreau

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nathaniel Hawthorn

e

Herman Melville

Walt Whitman

What

Is the «American Renaissance» ?

Who

Transcendentalism / «helle Romantik»

Literary genre?

Romanticism

- rejection of rationalism and materialism - primacy of the

imagination - importance of individuality and personal freedom - value of spontaneity and

self-expression

Negative Romanticism / «dunkle Romantik»

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nathaniel Hawthorn

e

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

God help the poor fellow who squares his life according to this.

Henry David Thoreau

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nathaniel Hawthorn

e

Herman Melville

Walt Whitman

What Is the «American Renaissance» ?

Henry David Thoreau

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nathaniel Hawthorn

e

Herman Melville

Walt Whitman

What Is «Beneath the American Renaissance» ?

David S. Reynolds

Henry David Thoreau

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nathaniel Hawthorn

e

Herman Melville

Walt Whitman

What Is «Beneath the American Renaissance» ?

David S. Reynolds

What Lies «Beneath the American Renaissance» ?

David S. ReynoldsTo 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

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

Edgar Allen Poe

Frederick Douglass

Susan Warner

Emily Dickinson

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)

- 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)

Tenets of the Hudson River School

Syllabus