In the Midst of Spoils is a setting, for SATB choir and small instrumental ensemble, of the poem "Blight," by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson's poem contrasts modern man's exploitative attitude toward nature with the more reverent attitude assumed by ancient or primitive cultures. This setting is in a single movement, approximately twenty minutes in duration, consisting of fifteen distinct sections.

Due to its emphasis on the concepts of self-reliance, inner guidance and the aboriginal Self, Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy elaborates theses that favor the individual over community, such as the superiority and sanctity of self-definition, as opposed to definitions constructed by society and imposed on the individual. It is possible, then, to perceive his philosophy as important for the formation of the Women's Rights Movement and for the emerging feminism. In his four romances, Nathaniel Hawthorne creates female protagonists who advocate for women's right to self-reliance as Emerson describes it. Hawthorne's heroines can be understood and interpreted as contemplating the Emersonian principles, thus illustrating the connection between Emerson's philosophy, and themes and motifs present in Hawthorne's romances. Related to Hawthorne's portrayal of the heroines' reflections on the concepts of inner guidance, the aboriginal Self, moral dereliction and self-reliance is Hawthorne's attitude toward the relationship between "womanhood" and "femininity" on one side, and "manhood" and "masculinity" on the other side. The ambivalence of woman, as depicted by Hawthorne, consists in the discrepancy between attributes traditionally associated with "femininity", such as devotion, affection and humility, and the will...

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Filosofía / El presente trabajo contempla el análisis comparado del rol de los estudios históricos en la conformación del individuo en ambos autores. Tanto Emerson como Nietzsche están en contra de una construcción del pasado que disminuya el valor del presente, sin embargo, en Nietzsche la historia no solo forma parte de la constitución del individuo, sino además una carga condicionante que no puede ser dejada de lado. La tesis es que ha sido esta preocupación por la historia la que hace que el pensamiento de Nietzsche pierda el carácter democrático y progresista que caracteriza al pensamiento de Emerson. Así, mientras el norteamericano dice que todos los seres humanos son la expresión de un alma común u oversoul, que puede ser entendida de manera casi panteísta, Nietzsche reserva las posibilidades de Self Reliance, es decir, de autoconfianza y autorrealización –usando un lenguaje más moderno- solo a los hombres superiores, de entre quienes deberá surgir el superhombre. La tesis sostiene que es la profundidad con la que Nietzsche considera la historia y la cultura lo que hace que entre estos autores surja esta diferencia fundamental.

This dissertation comparatively analyzes the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a nineteenth century American, and Jorge Luis Borges, a twentieth-century Argentinian, within the context of human rights. Through their writings, both Emerson and Borges provided a voice to the voiceless by addressing the most egregious violations of human rights during their respective days: For Emerson, the most virulent social ill was slavery; for Borges, it was fascism. While Emerson and Borges differ in several ways, they are remarkably similar in their emphasis of natural laws and natural rights, notably egalitarianism and liberty, which underpin humanity and comprise an integral aspect of civilization. By counteracting the antithesis of civilization, barbarism, the works of Emerson and Borges ultimately embody the tenets that would ultimately constitute The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Thus, Emerson and Borges are indelibly linked through serving as harbingers of human rights. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Ralph Waldo Emerson is a great American literary figure that began his career as a minister at Boston’s Second Church. He discontinued his ministry to become an essayist and lecturer and continued as such for the remainder of his life. This thesis was written with the intent of demonstrating that, in spite of leaving the ministry, Emerson continued to be religious and a religionist throughout his life and that he promulgated a unique religion based upon the principle of self-reliance. At the heart of Emerson’s religion of self-reliance is the doctrine of perfectionism, the infinite capacity of individuals. This thesis defines Emerson’s perfectionism and then tries to locate him in American Studies by contextualizing him with three of his religious contemporaries that were also preaching the doctrine of perfectionism. (109 pages)

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).

Abstract not available. / Thesis (M.A)-University of Durban-Westville, 1986.