Distribution Agreement In presenting this thesis or dissertation as a partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree from Emory University, I hereby grant to Emory University and its agents the non-exclusive license to archive, make accessible, and display my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known, including display on the world wide web. I understand that I may select some access restrictions as part of the online submission of this thesis or dissertation. I retain all ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. Signature: _____________________________ ______________ Joseph M. Johnson Date Transcendental Higher Learning: Emerson, Thoreau and the Idea of Liberal Arts By Joseph M. Johnson Doctor of Philosophy English _________________________________________ Benjamin Reiss Advisor _________________________________________ Michael Elliott Committee Member _________________________________________ Walter Reed Committee Member _________________________________________ Garth Tissol Committee Member Accepted: _________________________________________ Lisa A. Tedesco, Ph.D. Dean of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies _______________ Date Transcendental Higher Learning: Emerson, Thoreau and the Idea of Liberal Arts By Joseph M. Johnson B.A., Saint Michael’s College, 2000 M.A., Villanova University, 2005 Advisor: Benjamin Reiss, Ph.D. An abstract of a dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English 2015 Abstract Transcendental Higher Learning: Emerson, Thoreau and the Idea of Liberal Arts By Joseph M. Johnson Henry Thoreau's philosophy of education was more actively political than scholars have previously recognized. Transcendental Higher Learning begins by telling the story of Thoreau's dramatic reading of poetry and ancient classics at the radical abolitionist John Brown's memorial service in Concord on December 2, 1859. I return to this moment, which I interpret as the culmination of Thoreau's lifelong political engagement with higher learning, in chapter four. Thoreau's theory of books and reading was grounded in the antebellum classical college and looked forward, at the same time, to progressive theories of liberal arts that continue to shape the way we talk about higher education today. Chapter one shows how Emerson's view of the American scholar grew out of the romantic roots of the nineteenth-century classical college as well. Thoreau's theory of higher learning emerged as a variety of Harvard new humanism, filtered through Emerson and Harvard classicists like Cornelius Conway Felton, Thoreau's undergraduate professor of Greek. Chapters two and three argue that the only two book-length works Thoreau published in his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854), can be interpreted as an extension of Thoreau's undergraduate course of classical studies. Thoreau's educational vision evolved throughout his major works. He started with a conception of books and learning as a form of antimaterialism, a pursuit that has the power to challenge the reign of antebellum business and industrial society. Toward the end of his life, after the publication of A Week and Walden, Thoreau developed a stronger sense of liberal arts education as a vehicle for literary and civil disobedience. In 1859, Thoreau saw higher learning not as a private or passive pursuit but as a public and active political performance. Transcendental Higher Learning argues that Thoreau's mature view of education, as he practiced it at John Brown's memorial service in Concord on December 2, 1859, can help us better understand transcendentalist as an education movement. Thoreau's mature philosophy of higher learning as a progressive countercultural activity can help reanimate our own theory and practice of liberal arts in the twenty-first century as well. Transcendental Higher Learning: Emerson, Thoreau and the Idea of Liberal Arts By Joseph M. Johnson B.A., Saint Michael’s College, 2000 M.A., Villanova University, 2005 Advisor: Benjamin Reiss, Ph.D. A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English 2015 Acknowledgements A dissertation is not a sprint but a marathon. My pace was not swift. Heart-felt thanks are due to all those who waited for me, some more patiently than others, at the finish line. Special thanks to my committee, made up of admirable generous — and in many ways heroic — readers. My work would be nothing without the help of Benjamin Reiss, my advisor, whose comments I instantly agreed with and tried to incorporate along the way. Michael Elliott and Walter Reed provided equally incisive commentary toward the end of the project. Garth Tissol met with me regularly from the very start of the project, providing broad-gauged, widely diffused conversation and encouragement. I am honored to consider him a friend. I would also like to thank my wife, Sara, who has suffered through the dissertation process perhaps more painfully than I. She waited nonetheless, and we are off, tomorrow, to fresh woods and pastures new. My family, especially my parents, Janice and Michael, also provided loving support. Thank you. This dissertation is humbly dedicated to Rose Elizabeth, whose lively energy has made me happier than she will probably ever know. May you always read, my little Rosebud,with as wide an eye and open heart as you do now! I love you! Table of Contents INTRODUCTION Half-Way to Thermopylae 1 CHAPTER ONE Ancient Classics and the American Scholar 41 CHAPTER TWO Reading as Imaginative Travel in A Week 83 CHAPTER THREE Heroic Reading in Walden 126 CHAPTER FOUR Thoreau’s Universal Liturgy 152 EPILOGUE Transcendental Higher Learning for the Twenty-First Century 205 BIBLIOGRAPHY 211 1 Introduction Half-Way to Thermopylae Shortly after two o’clock on the afternoon of December 2, 1859, Henry Thoreau stood up to address a capacity audience at Concord Town Hall twenty miles west of Boston, Massachusetts. The occasion was a solemn one. The radical abolitionist John Brown had been executed in the state of Virginia only hours before, following a speedy trial and sentencing for his role as leader of a slave revolt at Harpers Ferry in October.1 Thoreau and the transcendentalists gathered at Concord Town Hall to commemorate the man they claimed as their own modern-day “saint” and “martyr.”2 Thoreau had been 1 On the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown led twenty-one men, including five African Americans, on a raid that seized the federal armory and rifle works at Harpers Ferry in Virginia. Brown’s plan was to seize weapons, arm local slaves, and then lead a broader revolt that would cut a path through the heart of the American South. Brown’s force of twenty-one men were surrounded at Harpers Ferry, however, and after a brief fight on October 18, Brown was captured by federal troops under the leadership of Colonel Robert E. Lee. Federal troops killed ten of Brown’s men, including two of his sons. Two federal troops were also killed. Brown was charged with treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, multiple first-degree murders, and inciting a slave insurrection. He was found guilty on November 2 and hanged a month later, on December 2, 1859. The account of Brown’s raid that I have found most useful is David Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Vintage, 2005). Reynolds’s thesis is reflected in his subtitle: Brown helped kill slavery by sparking the Civil War, initiating the long march toward civil rights for African-Americans in the United States. Other accounts I have found useful include John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), which situates John Brown as a political thinker, and Franny Nudelman, John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, & the Culture of War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), which helps explain the role of Brown’s martyrdom in the visual and literary rhetoric of the Civil War. 2 The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. XVIII, Journal XII (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 448-49. Further citations to the 1906 Walden edition of Thoreau’s 2 planning for weeks. “When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours (especially to-day) to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave,” Thoreau wrote in his journal on October 19, “what a merely brute, or worse than brute, force it is seen to be! A demoniacal force! It is more manifest than ever that tyranny rules” (JXII, 400).3 Thoreau fumed in the days and weeks leading up to John Brown’s memorial service in Concord. He was outraged by the negative public response to events at Harpers Ferry. “The Republican editors,” Thoreau writes, “obliged to get their sentences ready for the morning edition, — and their dinner ready before afternoon, — speak of . [Captain Brown and his] men, not in a tone of admiration for their disinterestedness and heroism, not of sorrow even for their fate, but calling them ‘deluded fanatics,’ ‘mistaken men,’ ‘insane,’ or ‘crazed’” (JXII, 406-7). Such cowards “know very well on which side their bread is buttered!” (JXII, 407). Thoreau describes Captain Brown, in stark contrast, as “A man of rare common sense and directness of speech, a Transcendentalist above all, a man of ideals and principles — that was what distinguished him” (JVIII, 420).