IN SEARCH OF SUBLIMITY

Basic Historical Themes	Cartoon Version	Pedagogy	Bartleby et al
The loss of hierarchy between the Renaissance (Puritan era in U.S.) and now leads to social anomie and facile individuality: the DeTocqueville passage.	Big Daddy: call it God at the top of the hierarchy or call it generational authority. Anxious students/children= 1837 = bad U.S. depression; just like today, all the youth anxious about getting a job and living up to the monumental careers of parents.	Students in Prof. Harvey’s class want to know what the rules are. And they sure would like it if he would maintain a sense of clock-time!
Writers of the Romantic Rebellion at once reflect this turn to interiority and attempt to rejuvenate/ empower selfhood with a sense of the sublime: Emerson.	..tick…tock..tick...tock…where’s that clock; can we lose the clock; do we need a clock?	It all starts to get a little confusing…too many ideas merging together.
Emerson goes into Nature to reject bourgeois conventionality, but ultimately Nature dissolves during his eyeball peak experience.  Emerson is more interested in self-reliance and sublime empowerment than social reform: see his Journals.  That is, although Nature is transcended too, he uses Nature to take him away from all sociality, politics, etc.	Emerson takes a walk on the wild sublime side (or talks about it)… leaves sociality/bourgeoisie being behind… and becomes a big, all encompassing, transcendental “being” (verb more than noun=power is the issue).  But note that nature also disappears.	Perhaps Prof. Harvey is inviting you to relax and stop taking notes (since such is covered, for instance, in the grid before your eyes, right now!). Perhaps learning can be a form of controlled spontaneity (i.e. like learning a hobby).
Fuller and Thoreau translate the quest for sublime being into a liberty-quest that actually considers forms of the social: for Fuller, this means pondering the political dynamics of gender inequality; for Thoreau, this means envisioning a private economy (simplicity) in opposition to capitalist spendthrift/luxury habits.	Picture one: the purity of Walden pond=self-reliance/autonomous/ “continent” …even though… mommy’s cookies are just a few miles away! Picture two: a shipwreck, off the Boston coast, carrying an Italian revolutionary, his genius bride in all but name, and child; on the shore, as it were, Hawthorne scoffs at the scandal of Fuller not being a bride, as she drowns in the perhaps better oblivion of the sea.	Students, Prof. Harvey, realizes, need some help with paper guidance: and thus the tips last week about building papers around seemingly isolated passages, with the trick being to see how every passage is saturated with meaning from its surrounding text/passages. Prof. Harvey: how much can he say about a wrongly ascribed passage? Duh… Ah, but that is the point: learn to say a lot about nothing. Tip: have profound ideas, which will lead to a decent thought-sequence in your papers (that is what a “thesis” is).  And then later worry about that pesky “thesis statement” that is supposed to appear in your essay introduction.
Our next set of writers (Melville, Irving, & Hawthorne: who are not Transcendentalists) use narrative, rather than abstract exposition or description, to see how a desire for the sublime can play out in “real” lives.  Although each story is well deserving of a week’s worth of discussion, we will discuss them as an interconnected cluster, getting at the real & profound problem of having a “self” that also must be “social”.  I really look forward to hearing what you all have to say about the stories (i.e. I’ll curb lecturing).   Tip & heads up: the discussion of these three stories will end up seeming rushed, but there is, from my end, a strategy: to tantalize you enough about the stories so you will potentially want to explore them more in your essay for this class, without “exhausting” what might be interpretively explored in class!	Pictures above are essentially cartoon reductions of biographical stories.  These 3 stories translate the sublime/desire—sociality tension into actual fictional narratives.  The “pictures” are the stories themselves! However, please keep in mind that the translation of metaphysical/transcendental urges into the plots of fictional narrative is inherently unstable, albeit very intriguing.  Emerson has difficulty getting language (eyeball passage) to “represent” his transcendental peak experience; in fictional narrative it gets even trickier.  The hallmark of “American Romanticism” will, typically, be a movement from the known to the unknown—e.g. staid lawyer in “Bartleby” but mysterious Bartleby himself; Rip, within an all-too-domestic scene, goes for a hike into the very un-realistic hills, and etc. Down-the-road I will explain how above translates into the pop-culture genres of the Western and science-fiction.		…are you like Wakefield, utterly conventional, but yearning to take a holiday from your conventionality? [he forgets the clock for a season] …are you like Bartleby, who takes a permanent holiday from conventionality (he gets lost in a very dark and odd interior sublimity, and never comes out)? [he revolts against the clock] …or are you like RIP… the prototype “slacker”!? [he’s too lazy to care about the clock]