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Introduction to Emerson and AI

Author: Thomas W. Howard, Bilkent University Note: This blog series is a companion to the panel “The End(s) of Originality?: The Transcendentalists and AI” at the 2024 C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists conference in Pasadena, California. When I first came up with the idea of a blog series on Emerson and AI in the […]

Ralph Emerson and Self-Cultivation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Author: Marc Martorana, Fellow at Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms In “The Coming Humanist Renaissance,” Adrienne LaFrance calls on readers to revisit Emerson’s reaction to the 19th-century technological renaissance as we contemplate the rise of artificial intelligence in our time. Heeding this call, I would like to consider how Emerson’s philosophy can inform our discussion […]

Running Away, But Still Running in Circles

Author: Carolina Maciel The exploitation of the human being in relation to its creations is considered as a widely spread concern proposed by the Transcendentalists. It was aphoristically disclosed by Thoreau in his 1854 book Walden, where he wrote that “Men have become tools of their tools” (37). Additionally, two of Emerson’s somewhat less popular […]

Emerson, Alcott, and Authorship: Transcendentalist Ideas in the Age of AI

Author: Emmy Brown, Georgia State University After a trip to Concord, I grew increasingly interested in the way the Concord circle of philosophers was deeply intertwined in each other’s artistic paths, specifically those of Louisa May Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s impact on Alcott’s personal life is clear, as seen in Moods, but his […]

Enlightened Machines?

Author: Jim Rittenhouse Alan Turing was an English mathematician. In 1950 he published a paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in which he described the “imitation game.” Over the years this game has been played thousands of times and is better known as the Turing Test. It was designed to answer the question of whether […]

Technically Speaking?

Author: Bill Younglove Ralph Waldo Emerson, like those of his Transcendental Era, believed in speaking for himself. This is evidenced by not only the number of publications during their lifetimes, but also via their anthologized epilogues. Whilst the “engine in the (Thoreau’s) garden” may have disrupted the sleep of some, other Industrial Revolutionary inventions, such […]

Reflections on Emerson and AI

Author: Frank Hall Through close readings of Emerson’s poems “Song of Nature” and “Brahma” and Emerson’s essays “Plato” and “Self-Reliance,” one comes to realize that, for Emerson, human consciousness is capable of Self-motivated thinking formed into unified verbal patterns. Moreover, for Emerson, human consciousness may experience receptive inspiration from cosmic Mind or Over-Soul. Most importantly, […]

Call for Applications for the 2024 Barbara L. Packer Fellowship

The Barbara L. Packer Fellowship is named for Barbara Lee Packer (1947-2010), who taught with great distinction for thirty years in the UCLA English department. Her publications, most notably Emerson’s Fall (1982) and her lengthy essay on the Transcendentalist movement in the Cambridge History of American Literature (1995), reprinted as The Transcendentalists by the University of Georgia Press (2007), continue to be esteemed […]

Call for Papers for 2024 Conferences

The Emerson Society and the William James Society will co-sponsor “Emerson & William James” at the American Literature Association Annual Conference, May 2024. It is well known that William James considered himself to be Ralph Waldo Emerson’s spiritual heir. Their lives were intertwined: Emerson was James’s godfather, and Emerson was so close with the James […]