Images of the artist as God : Puritan and Transcendental doctrine in Hawthorne\u27s developing aesthetic

This dissertation explores a rather conventional topic in Hawthorne studies: that is, Hawthorne\u27s aesthetic. Furthermore, it concentrates on a rather conventional theme: the conception of the artist as one who, in creating an artistic world, becomes a god-like figure. In contrast to previous critical analyses, however, this dissertation explores the development of Hawthorne\u27s aesthetic over the three decades in which he wrote short stories in order to understand the growth of that aesthetic. Thus, my analysis uses a great deal of historical, cultural, and biographical background in order to set up the different manifestations of the theme of the artist as god that Hawthorne reacted against. In the early part of his career, marked as the early 1830s before Transcendentalism, Hawthorne struggled primarily with a Puritan conception of art, very often suggesting that the artistic act might indeed be an immoral and blasphemous act as the Puritans believed. In the middle of his career, during the 1840s, Hawthorne came to accept the imaginative faculty largely because of the liberating effects of the new philosophy. But while Transcendentalism reveled in the artist\u27s use of the imagination to figure forth the unity of the universe, Hawthorne feared the loss of the artist\u27s individuality in this creative process. Such a fear was translated, in Hawthorne\u27s works of the 1840s, into a discussion of the relationship between the artist and a woman, ultimately leading Hawthorne to define a type of love that would allow the artist to create an artistic world even while remaining thoroughly human— thus abrogating the depiction, negative or positive, of the artist as god. The special relationship that exists between the artist and the community that surrounds him, represented in the love that exists between the artist and a woman, allows the artist, according to Hawthorne, to remain in touch with the real world while engaged with the ideal world, and thus to remain thoroughly human in the creative act My dissertation concludes with an analysis of the way in which Hawthorne\u27s definition of this relationship lies at the heart of his formulation of the Romance in the prefaces to his longer works of the 1850s

From Outsetting Bard to Mature Poet: Whitman\u27s "Out of the Cradle" and the Sea-Drift Cluster

Examines the theme of immortality in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," situating the poem in the larger context of the Sea-Drift cluster; argues that because previous readings have "attempted to see in that poem the full growth of the poet, the richness of the cluster as a whole has been lost.

From the Material to the Spiritual in the Sea-Drift Cluster: Transcendence in "On the Beach at Night," "The World below the Brine," and "On the Beach at Night Alone"

Focuses on three critically neglected poems in Whitman\u27s Sea-Drift cluster ("On the Beach at Night," "The World Below the Brine" and "On the Beach at Night Alone") and reads the poems as an important "interruption" in the cluster as a whole, in which the poet establishes crucial ideas of mortality, materiality and spirituality

From Outsetting Bard to Mature Poet: Whitman\u27s "Out of the Cradle" and the Sea-Drift Cluster

Examines the theme of immortality in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," situating the poem in the larger context of the Sea-Drift cluster; argues that because previous readings have "attempted to see in that poem the full growth of the poet, the richness of the cluster as a whole has been lost.

Remembering Sacred Reason: A Humboldtian Way of Knowing the World Sustainability Symposium [University of Northern Iowa, March 30, 2016]

An autumn afternoon about ten years ago, I found myself lying on the ground in the shade of a hundred-year-old live oak tree in Myakka River State Park in southwest Florida. The broad limbs of the ancient tree at once rose up like arms honoring the heavens and bowed down to the ground in an elegant semblance of thanksgiving