Situated at the crossroads of literary studies, ecocriticism and political theory, Active Enchantments explores a strain of thought within American literature that understands life in all of its forms to be generated not by self determined identities, but by interconnectedness and self abandonment. I argue that this interest led American writers across the nineteenth century to develop theories of subjectivity and of politics that not only emphasize the entanglement of the self with its environment, but also view this relationship as structured by self overcoming. Thus, when Emerson calls such interconnectedness "active enchantment," he means to signal life's inherent ability to constantly surpass itself, to never fully be identical with itself. My dissertation brings to the fore the political and ecological stakes of this paradox: if our selves and communities are molded by self abandonment, then the standard scholarly account of how nineteenth century American literature conceptualized politics must be revised. Far from understanding community as an organic production, founded on a teleological and harmonizing principle, the writers I study reconceive it around a sense of a commonality irreducible to fixed identity. The politics emerging out of such redefinition disposes with the primacy of individual or human agency, and becomes ecological in that it renders inoperative the difference between the social and the natural, the human and the non human, ourselves and what comprises us. It is the ecological dimension of what seems like a properly political question that brings together writers as diverse as Emerson and Sarah Orne Jewett, Margaret Fuller and Henry and William James. I argue, for example, that in Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, racial minorities emerge from geological strata as a kind of natural archive that complicates the nation's understanding of its communal origin. When she sets her romances on Native American shell mounds in Maine, or makes the health of a New England community depend on colonial pharmacopoeia and herbalist healing practices of the West Indies, Jewett excavates from history its silent associations and attunes us not only to the violent foundation of every communal identity, but to this identity's entanglement in a number of unacknowledged relations. Her work thus ultimately challenges the procedures of democratic inclusiveness that, however non violent, are nevertheless always organized around a particular notion of identity. The question of the self's constitutive interconnectedness with the world is as central to Margaret Fuller's work. Active Enchantments documents how Fuller's harrowing migraines enabled her to generate a peculiar conception of the "earthly mind," according to which the mind is material and decomposable, rather than spiritual, incorruptible or ideal. This notion eventually led her to devise a theory of the self that absolves persons from self possession and challenges the distinctiveness of personal identity. My concluding chapter argues that Henry James's transnational aesthetics was progressively politicized in the 1880s, and that what scholarship celebrates as the peak of his novelistic method develops, in fact, out of a network of surprising and heretofore unexplored influences, William James's concurrent theories of corporeal emotion, Mikhail Bakunin's anarchism, and Henry James's friendship with Ivan Turgenev, which inflamed James's interest in British politics, the Russo Turkish War, and the Balkan revolutions.

This dissertation explores the importance of the panorama for American Renaissance writers' participation in ideological formations in the antebellum period. I analyze how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe use the panorama as a metaphorical site to contest their different positions on epistemological and sociopolitical agendas such as transcendentalism, masculinist expansionism, and radical abolitionism. Emerson uses the panorama as a key metaphor to underpin his transcendental idealism and situate it in contemporary debates on vision, gender, and race. Connecting the panorama with optical theories on light and color, Emerson appropriates them to theorize his transcendental optics and makes a hierarchical distinction between light/transparency/panorama as metaphors for spirit, masculinity, and race-neutral man versus color/opacity/myopic vision for body, femininity, and racial-colored skin. In his paean to the moving panorama, Thoreau expresses his desire for Emersonian correspondence between nature and the spirit through transcendental panoramic vision. However, Thoreau's esteem for nature's materiality causes his panoramic vision to be corporeal and empirical in its deviation from the decorporealized vision in Emerson?s notion of transparent eyeball. Hawthorne repudiates the Transcendentalists' and social reformers' totalizing and absolutist idealism through his critique of the panorama and the emphasis on opacity and ambiguity of the human mind and vision. Hawthorne reveals how the panorama satisfies the desire for visual and physical control over the rapidly expanding world and the fantasy of access to truth. Countering the dominant convention of the Mississippi panorama that objectifies slaves as a spectacle for romantic tourism, Box Brown and Wells Brown open up a new American subgenre of the moving panorama, the anti-slavery panorama. They reconstruct black masculinity by verbally and visually representing real-life stories of some male fugitive slaves and idealizing them as masculine heroes of the anti-slavery movement. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe criticizes how the favorable representation of slavery and the objectification of slaves in the Mississippi panorama and the picturesque help to construct her northern readers' uncompassionate and hard-hearted attitudes toward the cruel realities of slavery and presents Tom's sympathetic and humanized "eyes" as an alternative vision.

This dissertation tracks the literary afterlife of natural history in American literature, long past its term of relevance for scientific experts, and examines how natural history persists as idiom, cultural metaphor, and discursive framework in nineteenth-century literature in a way that informs poetic production. At the juncture of literary and cultural history, history of science, and environmental studies, I reconstruct the enduring literary rapport between poetry and natural history in US culture, showing how the aesthetic innovations of a wide current of poetic experimentalism variously draw upon natural history as a resource. I therefore push against major received narratives about natural history’s disappearance after the eighteenth century and the development of American poetry as a filiation of European Romanticism. As I read the texts of familiar literary figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Frances Watkins Harper, and Herman Melville, I recontextualize these figures into a shared poetic strain that reflexively develops upon natural history as a mode of thinking about the New World as a biophysical, social, and cultural habitat. My chapters analyze these writers’ accounts of poetry and their various experiments with not only the capacities of poetic genres—such as epic or elegy—but also the material production of their poems as objects in the world. In the process, I also show how the different poets of my dissertation confront the violent historical and social repercussions of scientific modernity, colonialism, enslavement and racism, mass extermination, or war, as they advance poetry as the fit vehicle for rethinking the grids of normativity and possibility in modern America.

Three houses are presented in this book. Each house has been designed with distinct site parameters with the expectation that obvious differences in form would occur. The focus of this investigation lies within the significant parallels that exist between the projects and how those parallels relate to the principles that constitute a framework of operation for a designer. / Master of Architecture

Against the background of New Thought history in general, the dissertation researches the origins of the movement in South Africa. On the basis of primary documents, made available by leaders and other informants, questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and participant observation, the roots and history of New Thought in South Africa has been reconstructed. Aspects of New Thought belief, such as God, Jesus, Christ, the Bible, prayer, meditation, wealth, prosperity, death and reincarnation are discussed. It becomes apparent that, with its syncretistic, flexible and open structure, as well as the unique way in which services (weddings, christenings, funerals) are conducted, New Thought offers an alternative to spiritual and religiously minded people in South Africa, and shows potential to play a dynamic role in the cross-cultural bridging that is taking place in a changing South Africa. / Religious Studies and Arabic / M.A. (Religios Studies)

The purpose of this work is to detect a pattern: the concordance of Ethics and Aesthetics, Poetics and Politics in the most influential American thinker of the nineteenth century. It is an attempt to trace a basic concept of the Emersonian transcendentalist doctrine, its development, its philosophical meaning and practical implications. Emerson’s thought is analyzed genetically in search of the generating paradigm, or the set of axioms from which his aesthetic ideas as well as his political reasoning are derived. Such a basic structure, or point of convergence, is sought in the emergence of Emerson’s idea of universal laws that repeat themselves on all levels of reality. A general introduction is given in Part One, where the crisis in Emerson’s life is seen as representing and foreshadowing the deeper existential crisis of modern man. In Part 2 we follow the increasingly skeptical theologian’s turn to science, where he tries to secure a safe secular foundation for ethical good and right and to solve the problem of evil. Part 3 shows how Emerson’s conception of the laws of nature and ethics is applied in his political philosophy. In Part 4, Emerson’s ideas of the arts are seen as corresponding to his views of nature, morality, and individuality. Finally, in Part 5, the ancient and classical nature of Concord philosophy is brought into focus. The book concludes with a short summary.

This dissertation utilizes theories of deviance in conjunction with literary methods of reading and analyzing to study a range of deviant or transgressive characters in American literature of the 1840s and 50s. I justify this methodology on the basis of the intersecting and related histories of Emersonian self-reliance and deviance in American thought. I contend that each of the texts of self-reliance discussed by the dissertation – The National Police Gazette (1845-present), Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” (1849) and Walden (1854), and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) – actually sanctions deviance. Since deviance is endorsed by these texts in some shape or form, it is a critical component of American culture; consequently American culture is one that promotes deviance. My work on Douglass and Thoreau employs the sociological theories of Robert K. Merton (1949) to investigate the tensions between the culturally lauded goal of self-reliance and the legitimate means for securing this. I explore the importance of Transcendentalist self-reliance to the American Dream ethos and the ways in which it is valorized by each protagonist. The work on the National Police Gazette puts popular and elite forms of literary discourse into conversation with one another. My primary concern here is with explaining why and how specific self-reliant behaviours are deemed “deviant” in the literary context, but “criminal” by popular works. The chapters on female deviance elucidate the confines of women’s writing and writing about women as well as the acceptable female modes of conduct during the nineteenth century. They also focus on the ways female characters engaged in deviance from within these rigid frameworks. A functionalist interrogation of female deviance underscores the ways society is united against those women who are classed as unwomanly or unfeminine. My conclusion seeks to reinvigorate the conversation regarding the intersection between literature and the social sciences and suggests that literature in many ways often anticipates sociological theory. Ultimately, I conclude by broadening the category of the self-reliant individual to include, for instance, females and African-American slaves who were otherwise not imagined to possess such tendencies. Thus, this dissertation revises notions of Emerson’s concept of self-reliance by positioning it instead as a call to arms for all Americans to engage in deviant or socially transgressive behaviour.

This dissertation utilizes theories of deviance in conjunction with literary methods of reading and analyzing to study a range of deviant or transgressive characters in American literature of the 1840s and 50s. I justify this methodology on the basis of the intersecting and related histories of Emersonian self-reliance and deviance in American thought. I contend that each of the texts of self-reliance discussed by the dissertation – The National Police Gazette (1845-present), Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” (1849) and Walden (1854), and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) – actually sanctions deviance. Since deviance is endorsed by these texts in some shape or form, it is a critical component of American culture; consequently American culture is one that promotes deviance. My work on Douglass and Thoreau employs the sociological theories of Robert K. Merton (1949) to investigate the tensions between the culturally lauded goal of self-reliance and the legitimate means for securing this. I explore the importance of Transcendentalist self-reliance to the American Dream ethos and the ways in which it is valorized by each protagonist. The work on the National Police Gazette puts popular and elite forms of literary discourse into conversation with one another. My primary concern here is with explaining why and how specific self-reliant behaviours are deemed “deviant” in the literary context, but “criminal” by popular works. The chapters on female deviance elucidate the confines of women’s writing and writing about women as well as the acceptable female modes of conduct during the nineteenth century. They also focus on the ways female characters engaged in deviance from within these rigid frameworks. A functionalist interrogation of female deviance underscores the ways society is united against those women who are classed as unwomanly or unfeminine. My conclusion seeks to reinvigorate the conversation regarding the intersection between literature and the social sciences and suggests that literature in many ways often anticipates sociological theory. Ultimately, I conclude by broadening the category of the self-reliant individual to include, for instance, females and African-American slaves who were otherwise not imagined to possess such tendencies. Thus, this dissertation revises notions of Emerson’s concept of self-reliance by positioning it instead as a call to arms for all Americans to engage in deviant or socially transgressive behaviour.

Against the background of New Thought history in general, the dissertation researches the origins of the movement in South Africa. On the basis of primary documents, made available by leaders and other informants, questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and participant observation, the roots and history of New Thought in South Africa has been reconstructed. Aspects of New Thought belief, such as God, Jesus, Christ, the Bible, prayer, meditation, wealth, prosperity, death and reincarnation are discussed. It becomes apparent that, with its syncretistic, flexible and open structure, as well as the unique way in which services (weddings, christenings, funerals) are conducted, New Thought offers an alternative to spiritual and religiously minded people in South Africa, and shows potential to play a dynamic role in the cross-cultural bridging that is taking place in a changing South Africa. / Religious Studies and Arabic / M.A. (Religios Studies)

A presente tese carrega o ônus de afirmar a relevância dos textos de Henry David Thoreau para a filosofia moral. Duas estratégias paralelas foram utilizadas para cumprir a tarefa. A primeira consiste na discussão pormenorizada de um conjunto de autores que apresentaram para Thoreau diferentes visões sobre a moralidade e o papel da filosofia na tecitura de uma vida digna de ser vivida: o Unitarismo de William Ellery Channing, as doutrinas do Scottish Common Sense de Dugald Stewart e Thomas Reid, o utilitarismo teológico de William Paley, o intuicionismo racional dos Platonistas de Cambridge (representados aqui por Ralph Cudworth), Orestes Brownson e Ralph Waldo Emerson – dois dos principais nomes do Transcendentalismo da Nova Inglaterra e Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Cousin e Thomas Carlyle – primeiros intérpretes do Idealismo Alemão para o mundo de língua inglesa. A segunda estratégia articula a reação de Thoreau a essas diferentes posições sobre a moralidade, mostrando como, a partir dessa reação, ele foi capaz de formular um exercício de pensamento moral, cristalizado, emblematicamente, na escritura de Walden. O conceito de “identidade ficcional” foi pensado para capturar as diferentes técnicas utilizadas nesse exercício. / The present thesis carries the burden of asserting the relevance of Henry David Thoreau´s texts for moral philosophy. Two parallel strategies have been used to complete the task. The first is a thorough discussion of a group of authors who presented to Thoreau different views on morality and the role of philosophy in the weaving of a life worthy of being lived: William Ellery Channing´s Unitarianism, the doctrines of the Scottish Common Sense - Dugald Stewart and Thomas Reid, William Paley´s theological utilitarianism, rational intuitionism of Cambridge Platonists (represented here by Ralph Cudworth), Orestes Brownson and Ralph Waldo Emerson - two of the leading names of New England Transcendentalism and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Cousin and Thomas Carlyle - first interpreters of German Idealism to the English-speaking world. The second strategy articulates Thoreau´s reaction to these different positions on morality, showing how, from this reaction, he was able to formulate an exercise in moral thinking, crystallized, emblematically, in the writing of Walden. The concept of "fictional identity" was designed to capture different techniques used in this exercise.