The specific focus of this course is a reconsideration of American Transcendentalism and Pragmatism, from its philosophical and critical sources in Kant, Schelling, and Coleridge, to the work of Emerson and Charles Sanders Peirce. Most of the texts will be on-line; a course reader will be available at Professional Copy and Print after the start of the quarter.

This seminar is addressed not just to the philosophical issues of the subject, but on the essential role of the imaginative and the literary, for all the heirs of Kant and especially Emerson. The pivotal question is the social, political, and intellectual function of imaginative work, with a bearing on frequently divergent models of what the subject of "American studies" ought to be. Central to the work of the seminar will be thorough readings of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby Dick, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Democratic Vistas, as essential manifestations of the aspirations and dilemmas of the movement from Transcendental Idealism to Pragmatism.

Texts: NOTE: I have ordered these texts for convenience of reference, but virtually all of them will be available on line in machine readable and searchable format. If students have other editions, that should present no insurmountable problems. The books ordered, however, are well worth the cost.

Immanuel Kant: Critique of Judgment, Bernard translation
Friedrich Schelling: The System of Transcendental Idealism
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: selections from The Friend, Biographia Literaria, and On the Constitution of Church and State
Ralph Waldo Emerson; Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (Library of America)
Nathaniel Hawthorne; Collected Novels, ed.Millicent Bell (Library of America)
Herman Melville: Moby Dick (Norton Critical Edition)
Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (Library of America)
Charles Sanders Peirce: The Essential Peirce, vols I & II (Indiana)

Shorter works by William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, Walter Benn Michaels, and others.