These Desponding Days : Emerson and America's Crisis of Textual Authority

SMITH, Jeffrey Alan. These Desponding Days : Emerson and America's Crisis of Textual Authority. Litteraria Pragensia. Praha: Ústav anglofonních literatur a kultur FF UK, 2014, vol. 24, No 48, p. 79-93. ISSN 0862-8424.

Basic information

• Original name: These Desponding Days : Emerson and America's Crisis of Textual Authority
• Authors: SMITH, Jeffrey Alan (840 United States of America, guarantor, belonging to the institution).
• Edition: Litteraria Pragensia, Praha, Ústav anglofonních literatur a kultur FF UK, 2014, 0862-8424.

Other information

• Original language: English
• Type of outcome: Article in a journal
• Field of Study: 60200 6.2 Languages and Literature
• Country of publisher: Czech Republic
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• WWW: URL
• RIV identification code: RIV/00216224:14210/14:00085458
• Organization unit: Faculty of Arts
• Keywords in English: Ralph Waldo Emerson; Bible; United States; Nineteenth-century literature; Joseph Smith; William Miller; Walt Whitman
• Tags: Bible, Joseph Smith, Nineteenth Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rivok, United States, Walt Whitman, William Miller
• Tags: International impact, Reviewed

Abstract

Americans in the era of the Second Great Awakening faced a problem intrinsic to Protestantism: the difficulty of grounding authority in a sacred text. Ralph Waldo Emerson's emergence from Unitarian circles immediately followed three native-born religious movements, each of which had focused on one aspect of that problem. William Miller's Adventism responded to doubt; Alexander Campbell's Restorationism took aim at sectarian disagreement; and Joseph Smith's Mormonism vividly sought to overcome dullness. Re-reading and even rewriting the Bible in increasingly radical ways, these movements represented three of the logically possible answers to the self-contradictions of textual authority. This essay argues for seeing Emerson's Transcendentalism as a fourth way. What linked this movement both to Unitarian controversy and romantic idealism, on the one hand, and on the other to the modern creation of a new, secular literary "canon" of America's own, was its immersion in biblical and textual anxieties. Recovering and re-employing the spirit behind the ancient sacred books, Transcendentalists insisted on rethinking not just the Bible but text-based authority as such – and like the other movements, they did this to counter a particular problem: in their case, an array of modern ills that Emerson summed up in the word "desponding."

Links

• MUNI/A/1246/2014, interní kód MU: Name: Nové směry v anglofonním jazykovědném a literárním výzkumu III (Acronym: NDALLR3)

Investor: Masaryk University, Category A