Transcendentalism and American Poetry
St Petersburg University and its Representative Office in Barcelona invite you to the online lecture "Transcendentalism and American Poetry". During the lecture, you will learn about the key representatives of the first independent movement in philosophy and literature. The lecture will be delivered by Nina Shcherbak, Candidate of Philology.
Since the mid-1830s, a literary and philosophical movement, Transcendentalism, has played an important role in the spiritual life of the United States and the development of national culture. The Transcendental Club first met in September 1863 in the City of Boston, the capital of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The club was named after the doctrine of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s "transcendental idealism". The term expressed an important idea: the light of truth comes to man transcendently, i.e. apart from experience, by intuition and revelation.
A century after his death, Ralph Emerson still seems more of an icon than a classic. His works are read, reread and argued about. He continues to be a symbol, a monument in the national pantheon, and his texts are a treasure trove of quotations. Ralph Emerson, trained as a theologian at Harvard in 1821, is regarded as one of the finest writers and the bearer of the most resolute intellectual experiences of the 19th century. Emerson is the author of: Self-reliance; a manifesto on overcoming the cruelty of existence, Compensation; and Over-soul, a work that had a profound influence on the minds of American writers.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892), the famous American poet and verse innovator, is also considered to be one of the main authors of Transcendentalism. Whitman was one of the first to ‘break’ the syllable and at the same time retain a certain tunefulness of verse, bringing it closer to the rhythm of the psalms.
Thomas Eliot is another shining example of a new form of American poetry. He was the inventor of the theory of the "objective correlative", author of the poem The Waste Land, the poems Second Caprice in North Cambridge and The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.
Lecturer
Nina Shcherbak is Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature.
The lecture will be held as part of the events to mark the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg University, the oldest university in Russia.
The meeting will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish.