Hauptseminar Wonderfully like the Orientals The Influence of Islamic Mysticism on American Romantic Literature

Transcendentalism certainly played an essential role in the shaping of the American Romantic imagery, yet, more often than not, Transcendentalists have been strictly canonized as essentially ‘American.’ This does not do justice to their desire to develop a transcultural, boundary-less imagery, and to address human experience as ‘universal.’ Over the last decades, scholars have questioned the Western-centered reading of American Transcendentalism, venturing as far as claiming that such perspective has severely limited the understanding of these texts. Recent scholarship has strongly re-evaluated Asian influences on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Luisa May Alcott among others. It has been proven that the Transcendentalists were avid readers of religious literature from Asia – which found its way into their text and, ultimately, into the American literary experience. Among the Asian influences on Transcendentalism, the Sufi connection remains the less studied. This course will pay special attention to the resonance of Islamic mystic poetry from Persia and Turkey, looking at how works of Rumi, Hafiz, Attar, and others have shaped the Transcendentalist imaginary. In the course of the semester, we will compare Rumi’s Mathnawi and Divani Shamsi Tabriz with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, or Attar’s The Conference of the Birds with Thoreau’s Walden. We will look at themes and symbols dear to both Islamic mysticism and American Romanticism, such as nature, desire, the body, and the Self. This course hopes to demonstrate that the spiritual knowledge of Islam is ingrained the core of American literature and has helped designing the core tenets of the American spirit and imagination. Anglistik Universität Duisburg-Essen SoSe 2015 M.A. Furlanetto Elena M.A