Two recent books invite reflection on the value of transcendentalism by considering what it becomes after its heyday. Bruce Ronda’s The Fate of Transcendentalism (2017) takes up writers from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth in “an effort to discern the lineage of transcendentalism in the years after its historical moment” (2). Christopher Hanlon’s Emerson’s Memory Loss (2018) focuses on transcendentalism’s central figure, urging us to read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s earlier and best-known works “through the lens offered by [his] later writings in order to disrupt their more familiar patterns of resonance” (4). I wish to emphasize the sense, shared by Ronda and Hanlon, that in certain moments transcendentalist writings can come alive, while at other times they will have gone dead. For Hanlon, Emerson’s later works are valuable because they enable us “to activate something in him that would otherwise remain dormant” (8). And Ronda asks us to see transcendentalism as less “a coherent movement or tradition” than “a set of people, texts, episodes, and memories that come bracingly alive in distinctive, quirky, and sometimes disputatious ways” in the years after its emergence (202). Both offer historically minded accounts of transcendentalism, although the term is central only to Ronda’s book. But in tilting toward later times, the books suggest what is to my mind the most pressing question about transcendentalism: What can it contribute to our sense of the present moment and our capacity to imagine more just and livable futures? How might it come bracingly alive for us? Taken as a movement, transcendentalism should not be considered apart from the contributions of Margaret Fuller, William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Orestes Brownson, and several others. But what follows will attend primarily to Emerson, secondarily to Henry David Thoreau. The present

中文翻译：

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无逃避的超验主义

最近的两本书通过考虑超验主义在其鼎盛时期后会变成什么样子，邀请人们对超验主义的价值进行反思。布鲁斯·隆达 (Bruce Ronda) 的《超验主义的命运》(The Fate of Transcendentalism，2017 年) 将 19 世纪后期到 20 世纪的作家纳入“努力在其历史时刻之后的几年中辨别超验主义的谱系”(2)。克里斯托弗·汉隆 (Christopher Hanlon) 的《爱默生的失忆》(Emerson's Memory Loss，2018 年) 关注超验主义的核心人物，敦促我们“通过 [他] 后期作品提供的镜头来阅读拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生 (Ralph Waldo Emerson) 早期和最著名的作品，以破坏他们更熟悉的共鸣模式”（ 4）。我想强调隆达和汉隆所共有的那种感觉，即在某些时刻，超验主义的作品可以复活，而在其他时候，它们就会消亡。对于汉隆来说 爱默生后期的作品很有价值，因为它们使我们能够“激活他内心原本处于休眠状态的某些东西”（8）。隆达要求我们将超验主义视为“一种连贯的运动或传统”，而不是“一组人、文本、情节和记忆，它们在其出现后的几年里，以独特、古怪、有时是有争议的方式充满活力”（ 202)。两者都提供了对超验主义的具有历史意义的描述，尽管该术语仅在隆达的书中占据核心地位。但在向后倾斜时，这些书提出了我认为关于超验主义最紧迫的问题：它对我们对当下的感觉和我们想象更公正、更宜居的未来的能力有什么贡献？它如何为我们带来活力？作为一种运动，除了玛格丽特·富勒、威廉·埃勒里·钱宁、西奥多·帕克、伊丽莎白·帕默·皮博迪、奥雷斯特斯·布朗森和其他几个人的贡献之外，不应考虑先验主义。但接下来的内容将主要关注爱默生，其次是亨利大卫梭罗。现在的