TRANSCENDENTALISM LIGHT AND DARK: STRATEGIES FOR TEACHING THE WRITINGS OF EMERSON, THOREAU, POE, DICKINSON AND WHITMAN

Non-residential Institute

JUNE 28-30 • BIRMINGHAM

Alabama Humanities Foundation

Lead scholar: Gale Temple, Ph.D., University of Alabama Birmingham

This institute will impart practical and engaging strategies for teaching the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman and Poe. The primary focus of the sessions will be on connecting the works of these important antebellum writers to the social and political debates and discourses that
were prevalent in antebellum America, and that in many cases continue to resonate in the lives of Americans today. As such, we will focus less on how the transcendentalists praised nature or idealized self-reliant individualism than on how their writings were fundamentally connected to the politics of reform in the middle decades of the 19th century.

The three-day, non-residential institute will begin with a survey of some of the most pressing social and political issues of the antebellum years such as slavery, women’s rights, immigration, temperance and the entrenchment of the capitalist market. We will also look at some of the more bizarre manifestations of social experimentation in the 19th century such as mesmerism, spirit rapping, phrenology, physiognomy and scientific racialism. Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman and Poe
engaged through their fiction, poetry and essays these social, political and even occult phenomena—sometimes in ways that were progressive and idealistic, and at other times in ways that were tinged with pessimism, irony and even macabre Gothicism.

When we teach Transcendentalism as a movement vitally connected with the politics of social experimentation and reform in the 19th century, it enriches how we perceive these sometimes difficult and seemingly esoteric writers.

Note: Participants will receive a modest stipend.

Click here for APPLICATION GUIDELINES

Click here for this institutes's APPLICATION FORM in Microsoft Word format.

Location: Alabama Humanities Foundation offices, Birmingham

Dates: June 28-30

Times: Program begins Tuesday at 8 a.m. and concludes Thursday at 3 p.m. Evening sessions will end at 7 p.m.

Format: Non-residential seminar.

Meals: Lunch and a.m., p.m. breaks provided. Participant is responsible for all other meals.

Lodging: Participants are required to secure and pay for their own lodging.

CEUs: 24 contact hours

Please check back to this website frequently for session topics, resource materials and activities.

For all questions concerning this program, contact
Thomas E. Bryant: tbryant@ahf.net, (205) 558-3997

Additional program support is provided by:

ALEX (Alabama Learning Exchange)

ACCESS (Alabama Connecting Classrooms, Educators, and Students Statewide)