PhD candidate in English

(Graduate Resident Fall 2024)

My dissertation examines American Romanticists’ aporetic relationship with pantheism, a metaphysics famously articulated by Baruch Spinoza as “Deus sive Natura” (God or Nature). Inspired by this radical immanentism that equates God with Nature and mind with matter, nineteenth-century American writers envisioned a civic religion of democracy where all beings, as parts of divinity, exist on an ontological plane of equality. However, they also grappled with the ethical ambiguities inherent in this democratic vision: as Alexis de Tocqueville noted, the collapse of the dualist division between spirit and matter dissolves a transcendent moral order, embedding individuals within a deterministic nature and challenging their free will to shoulder moral responsibility. Through readings of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Poe, and Hawthorne, I explore how their works exemplify a constitutive tension between pantheist immanentism and idealist dualism at the heart of American Romanticism, a tension that bespeaks the boundless promise of a democratic aspiration as well as its perennial frustration. Framing pantheism as a uniquely democratic impulse, my study invites an engagement with the complexities of immanent ethics—a central dilemma of the modern condition.