John Milton, par son œuvre polémique en prose, a exercé une influence importante d’abord sur les colonies américaines, et ensuite aux Etats-Unis. C’est autour de l’interprétation de son statut de Dissenter que se met en place la construction d’une figure d’identification qui traverse les époques, pendant la Révolution et la campagne abolitionniste notamment. Cette thèse cherche à identifier les mécanismes et les moments fondamentaux de cette transmission culturelle, à travers le parcours de plusieurs auteurs américains : le Quaker John Woolman, l’abolitionniste William Garrison, et le Transcendantaliste Ralph Waldo Emerson. On analysera comment l’évolution de la définition du dissent a permis à l’œuvre de Milton d’accompagner différents mouvements intellectuels américains. On verra comment, à partir de racines anglaises, les problématiques soulevées par Milton dans les années 1640 à 1660, ont pu frapper ses lecteurs transatlantiques comme étant pertinentes pour leur époque, et comment l’œuvre en prose de Milton a pu participer à la définition de la désobéissance civile. / : John Milton in his prose works had a deep influence in North America, first in the colonies, and then in the United States. His status as a Dissenter, subject to many interpretations, enabled him to remain relevant throughout the different stages of American history, allowing actors from the American Revolution or the abolitionist campaign to identify with him and his works. This dissertation aims at identifying the mechanisms and stages of this form of cultural transmission, through the study of several American authors: the Quaker John Woolman, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rooted in the English Civil War, the issues raised by Milton between 1640 and 1660 nonetheless strike a chord within his American readers as germane to their time. This work shall also investigate how Milton’s prose work, through the shifting definitions of Dissent, directly influenced the concept of civil disobedience.

Departing from humanist models of American intellectual history, this dissertation proposes an alternative posthumanist approach to the thought of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Beginning with Perry Miller’s influential scholarship, American thought is often cast as a search for “face to face” encounters with the unaccountable God of Calvinism, a figure that eventually evolves to encompass Romantic notions of the aesthetic, imagination, or, most predominately, individual human feeling. This narrative typically culminates in the pragmatism of William James, a philosophy in which human feeling attains priority at the expense of impersonal metaphysical systems. However, alongside and against these trends runs a tradition that derives from the Calvinist distinction between a fallen material world and a transcendent God possessed of absolute sovereignty, a tradition that also anticipates posthumanist theory, particularly the self-referential distinction between system and environment that occupies the central position in Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. After systems theory, the possibility for “face to face” encounters is replaced with the necessary self-reference of communication and observation, an attribute expressed in Edwards, Emerson, and Peirce through, respectively, the figures of “true virtue,” an absent and inexpressible grief and, in its most abstract form, Peirce’s concept of a sign. In conclusion, Edwards, Emerson, and Peirce represent an alternative posthumanist genealogy of pragmatism that displaces human consciousness as the foundational ground of meaning, communication, or semiosis.

ABSTRACT Genial Thinking: Frost, Stevens, Ashbery by Andrew A. Klein This dissertation explores how Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery have responded to the problem of philosophical skepticism that they inherit from Emerson: that while things do in fact exist, direct knowledge of them is beyond our ken. Traditionally read within the framework of an evolving Romanticism that finds them attempting to resolve this problem through some form of synthesis or transcendence, I argue instead that these poets accept the intractability of the problem so as to develop forms of thinking from within its conditions. Chapter One explains why poetry is particularly suited to this sort of thinking and what it can achieve that philosophy (or at least a certain understanding of it) cannot. Chapter Two focuses on the act of listening in Stevens’s poetry as a way to show how Stevens is not, as is typically thought, interested in “the thing itself,” but in "the less legible meaning of sounds," the slight, keen indecision that resonates in between sense and understanding. Chapter Three focuses on those moments in Frost’s poetry when, instead of attempting to comprehend, seize, grasp, and represent reality through the use of metaphor, he chooses to regard its inappropriability or otherness. And Chapter Four focuses on how Ashbery’s constant shifts of focus are not just the wanderings of his mind, but a technique for disrupting our absorption in a single plane of attention so as to achieve new economies of engagement. Overall, though, the goal of this project is to move the discussion about this line of poets out of the epistemological register within which they are usually read and into an ethical one.

This paper discusses what Ralph Waldo Emerson believes to be the aim of education and how he thinks the aim is to be reached.

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京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・論文博士 / 博士(教育学) / 乙第13298号 / 論教博第169号 / 新制||教||190(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院教育学研究科臨床教育学専攻 / (主査)准教授 齋藤 直子, 教授 西平 直, 准教授 Jeremy Rappleye / 学位規則第4条第2項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Education) / Kyoto University / DGAM

This dissertation examines how Concord, Massachusetts became a heritage town in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Concord-based authors (including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott) at once contributed to Concord’s attractiveness as a location and took advantage of the growing reputation and popularity of the town as a tourist site. Their writings, rooted in Concord, drew attention to the town and to themselves as authors within it, while also elevating the stature of American literature. Linking literature and site-building, Concordians encouraged contemporaneous sightseeing in a curated landscape. This sets the origins of tourism and site-building in Concord earlier than standard academic narratives of Progressive Era preservation in New England. The primary contribution of this interdisciplinary study is to trace the ways in which collective memory was fashioned for an audience of literary “arm-chair travellers” and then employed to endow private houses with literary and historical importance to national heritage, as public locations to be visited and preserved in Concord’s landscape. This work traces the development of spiritualized “places” in Concord from Revolutionary War monument-building to Emerson’s literary community investing the landscape with poetic associations, Hawthorne’s engagement of tourism as an appeal to readers, and George William Curtis’s efforts to market Concord as a national literary retreat. It further examines Thoreau’s literary career in relation to his interest in local history, tourism, and museum-building in his hometown. Finally, the popularity of Alcott’s Little Women boosted tourism in Concord, and the increase of visitors coincided with projects to memorialize Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Transcendentalist movement in the landscape. These efforts culminated in the development of guide books and organized tours for visitors, and the emergence of a local souvenir industry. The study concludes with the institutionalization of historic house museums in the early twentieth century.

This essay is an examination of the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on the development of American art through his essays, specifically his writings on nature and self-reliance. Through emphasizing individual potential, Emerson also influenced the visual arts. Instead of following the required formula in Europe of attending certain ateliers and seeking prestigious patronage, American artists, namely the Luminists and the Ashcan School, sought to address the issues of their day and portray life as it existed around them. Each of these groups formed during periods of time when American society was shifting and the American identity was evolving. Through addressing the issues at hand, artists formed an American aesthetic separate from the traditional methodologies in Europe, in turn, contributing to a national identity. After the Civil War, the United States underwent considerable change as different areas of the nation redefined themselves in conjunction to new laws and shifts in social structure. For the Luminists, the writings of Emerson concerning nature were especially applicable during this time since most people in the United States lived in rural circumstances and still struggled to define a national art separate from European tradition. Emerson focused on nature's ability to uplift and inspire mankind, bringing them closer to the Divine and America's unique and untamed nature was one aspect that separated it from Europe. The Luminists focused on their surrounding natural environment, portraying the connection between man and nature. During the Progressive Age, Robert Henri followed Emerson's instruction to illustrate life as it existed for him in the early twentieth century. By this time, most people had moved to the cities in search of employment and everyone was crammed into small tenements. Henri taught his art students to value and illustrate life in all of its gritty reality. In this way, he followed Emerson to communicate beauty through an honest interpretation of life. Although diverse in their techniques, the Luminists and Robert Henri both utilized the ideas of Emerson to help define an American aesthetic.

The aim of this MA thesis was to analyze the correspondences and differences between the individual philosophers and writers from the loosely formed intellectual group of Euro- American pragmatism. The thesis utilizes a chronological approach, starting with the early signs of transatlantic pragmatism in Immanuel Kant's philosophy, and traces this development throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century. In addition to the comparison of philosophical similarities and dissimilarities of the examined authors, each chapter also considered the possible uses of pragmatic techniques in pedagogy and education. Therefore, besides the examination of differing epistemologies of writers of transatlantic pragmatism, this thesis also aims to offer educational suggestions, ideas and practical methods for an educator. The first chapter of the thesis is designed to introduce the theme of the work at large. The second chapter of the thesis analyzes the rudimentary signs of pragmatism, in the revolutionary ideas of Immanuel Kant and Johan Gottlieb Fichte. This chapter focuses on the genesis of subjective idealism, subjective category creation and Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, along with his lectures on vocations. The third chapter surveys the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his approaches towards the...

This thesis explores three of Ralph Waldo Emerson's seminal texts, Nature (1836), the "Woodnotes" poems (1840, 1841), and Representative Men (1850), in a transatlantic Romantic context. Augmenting typical transatlantic explorations of Emerson's literature which often use these three works in demonstration of the various European Romantic assimilations n Emerson's writing, the texts considered in this study are understood to engage with one British work predominately. Emerson engages antagonistically in the pages of Nature with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825), in the "Woodnotes" poems with William Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814), and in Representative Men with Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). In each instance, Emerson engages with a text that he understands to be particularly representative of the intellectual and creative genius that its British author wields and, as such, one that is anxiety-inducing in the influence that it wields. This thesis demonstrates that, in engaging with these works, Emerson performs with increasing sophistication a process of "'creative reading,' that is, an act of reading (influx) through which creation (efflux, expression) is made possible through a transcendence of the past. In doing so, Emerson confronts and attempts to gain independence both from the personal influence that these texts and, more significantly, their authors wield. In engaging in Nature, the "Woodnotes" poems, and Representative Men with Aids to Reflection, The Excursion, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History respectively, Emerson assimilates into his works various elements of Coleridge's, Wordsworth's, and Carlyle's thought. Each of the three chapters comprising this thesis explores Emerson's intellectual indebtedness in this regard and, as such, the explorations incorporate a scholastic focus like that found in the majority of Emersonian transatlantic scholarship. In each instance, however, explorations of Emerson's works also reveal the American writer's performance of a liberating act of detachment or departure from the ideas with which he engages. These intellectual detachments distinguish Emerson's thought from that of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle, and are often attended by formal departures from the texts with which Emerson engages. Augmenting typical transatlantic explorations of Emerson's works, this thesis focuses not only Emerson's Romantic assimilations, but also on his detachments. Finally, in each instance, Emerson's confrontations reflect Robert Weisbuch's assessment in Atlantic Double-Cross (1986) that nineteenth century Anglo-American literary relations are 'always more than personal and individual' (21). That is to say, in each instance, Emerson confronts not only Coleridge, Wordsworth's, and Carlyle's personal creative and intellectual influence, but their extrapersonal or national influence as British writers. This confrontation of national influence is reflected in the fact that Emerson's detachments incorporate temporal reimaginings, re-visions of time that nullify the potency of the past and of the influence wielded by tradition by emphasising the present and the future, focusing on the subjective power of the mind. As such, Emerson's conceptions of time demonstrate a conflation of two specifically American understandings of temporality as defined by Robert Weisbuch - vertical time and futurism - both developed by nineteenth century American writers in order to nullify the influence of Old World, specifically British, tradition, and to establish an account of time in which the United States' comparative lack of distinct cultural history is excused. In precis, this thesis demonstrates that Nature, the "Woodnotes" poems, and Representative Men issue from Emerson's creative reading of Aids to Reflection, The Excursion, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History respectively. These acts of creative reading demonstrate in each instance the inextricability of Coleridge's, Wordsworth's, and Carlyle's 'personal' creative and intellectual influence, as well as their 'extrapersonal' or national influence.