The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society is sponsoring a panel titled "Transcendentalist Legacies of Resilience" at the Throeau Society Annual Gathering, 2024.

“Resilience” is not a word that Emerson used. Yet, there is much in Emerson’s writings about Nature's restorative power, and essays such as “Self-Reliance,” “Circles,” “Experience,” “Power,” “Fate,” “Courage,” and “Character” contain lines of argument that can be read as analogous and perhaps even foundational to our contemporary notions of resilience. As he states in “Courage,” it  “perfect will, which no terrors can shake, which is attracted by frowns and threats or hostile armies, nay, needs these to awake and fan its reserved energies into a pure flame, and is never quite itself until the hazard is extreme; then it is extreme and fertile, and all its powers play well.”

This panel seeks papers that advocate for a reading of Emersonian resilience and that consider how the Transcendentalists responded to personal, political, societal, and technological change in their own time as well as how they influenced later thinkers and movements. Topics might include, but are not limited to, political and social movements such as abolitionism, civil rights, environmentalism, labor reform, or personal trauma.  

Please send a title and an approximately 250-word abstract to Bill Scalia -- bscalia@alumni.lsu.edu -- by January 12, 2024.