Recent changes in the historiography of American Transcendentalism have inspired a reappraisal of the relationship between the Transcendentalist movement in New England and the pietistic wing of the Unitarian church. This thesis explores this reappraisal through a close reading of selected writings by Henry Ware Jr. in juxtaposition to the more familiar strains of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Divinity School Address and other Transcendentalist texts of the late 1830's and early 1840's. In opposition to the view that American Transcendentalism is an imported form of German Romanticism, the thesis argues that both Emerson and Ware represent a response on the part of rational religious liberalism to the emotional enthusiasm of the Evangelical movement, and that the primary inspiration for Emerson's philosophy came from his own mentor in the Unitarian ministry. Henry Ware Jr. was the senior minister of the Second Church in Boston from 1817-1830. Emerson was called to that same congregation in 1829 to serve as Ware's assistant and eventual successor. From 1830 to 1842 Ware was "Professor of Pulpit Eloquence and the Pastoral Care" at the Harvard Divinity School. His Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching was an influential handbook of homiletics. His devotional manual On the Formation of the Christian Character went through fifteen editions. His sermon "The Personality of the Deity" has traditionally been perceived as a response to Emerson's controversial 1838 address, which Emerson delivered at the height of Ware's tenure at the Divinity School, and which is often depicted as the opening salvo of the so-called "Transcendentalist Controversy." Chapter One of the thesis summarizes the changes in the historiography of American Transcendentalism. Chapter Two relates Ware's "Formation of Christian Character" to the broader Unitarian understanding of Self-Culture, which the Transcendentalists also shared. Chapter Three compares Ware's "Hints" to the Emersonian ideal of preaching as proclaimed in the Divinity School Address. Chapter Four addresses the issue of the "Personality of the Deity" in relation to Emerson's notion of an "Over-Soul." The final chapter offers some personal observations about the nature of history and the reappraisal of the relationship between Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. / Graduation date: 1996

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.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 2001. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2824. Typescript. Abstract appears on leaf [2]. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-84).

This study investigated the work of design theorist Denman Waldo Ross and his theory of “pure design.” During the early twentieth century, Ross delivered lectures, published articles and books, and mused endlessly on the subject of art and design pedagogy. He taught future architects, designers, and art teachers at Harvard University, and acted as a patron to artists and art theorists. He also served on numerous boards and panels, helping to govern the Boston public schools, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Academy of Arts and Sciences, among others. His work is not widely known today, but it was influential during a critical moment in American art education history. Arthur Wesley Dow is often credited as initiator of the elements and principles of design—an unfair burden for him to bear. Denman Waldo Ross, too, participated in the development of the language and terminology related to the elements and principles of design in the canon of art education at the turn of the twentieth century. / text

Thesis (M.M.) -- Florida State University, 2004. / For baritone voice with clarinet, violin, horn, piano and percussion (2 players). Words of songs printed as text on p. iv. Advisor: Ladislav Kubik, Florida State University, School of Music. Title and description from thesis home page (viewed 9-29-04). Document formatted into pages; contains 47 pages. Includes biographical sketch.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 152-154). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 255-262).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 439-457).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan. / "It is the aim ... of this dissertation to treat of Emerson's critical opinion of Goethe."--Pref. Bibliography: 195-197.