In order to introduce, Hawthorne's " The Scarlet Letter", we are first examining literary movements in America starting with the 18th Century's Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment. On the whiteboard, I created a chart identifying the characteristics of Enlightenment thinking, and of the later Romantic movement -a rejection of reason in favor of emotion and imagination- prevalent in the first half of the 19th Century. I then noted how the American Transcendentalist movement was an offshoot of the Romantic movement , and on the whiteboard identified the elements of Transcendentalist writers such as Thoreau and Emerson. We discussed how the Transcendentalists influenced Hawthorne , Poe and Melville as evidenced by these authors' reliance on imagination,symbolism, and emotion rather than reason and logic as a means of imparting theme. To assist Olivia in her reading of Emerson, I elaborated on Emerson's philosophy that through a study of nature ,man can "transcend" physical reality and join with what Emerson described as a "universal oversoul". For homework due Monday,I assigned reading from the literature book on the Transcendentalists , as well as Emerson's essays , "Nature" and "Self - Reliance" .