Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, the second in a 16-week sequence on American literature and the second of two on the Transcendentalist movement, focuses on essays by Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. The first 10 minutes are available as a free preview. We consider Thoreau’s libertarianism, his anti-sentimental radicalism, his influence on passive resistance, his heroic vitalism, his classicism, his startling hatred of nature, and his final vision of nature as an excremental mother. Then we turn to Fuller’s feminism, her survey of ideal cultural images of women from antiquity to her own time, her insistence that women’s development of Emersonian self-culture and self-reliance will necessarily lead them away from motherhood, her view of the masculine and feminine as principles and forces, and her concept of the two leading feminine archetypes, Muse and Minerva. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including Moby-Dick, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
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