When Ralph Waldo Emerson Pronounced America’s Declaration of Cultural Independence from Europe in his “American Scholar” Address

Reading Passage Question

Question: When Ralph Waldo Emerson pronounced America’s declaration of cultural independence from Europe in his “American Scholar” address, he was actually articulating the transcendental assumptions of Jefferson’s political independence. In the ideal new world envisioned by Emerson, America’s becoming a perfect democracy of free and self-reliant individuals was within reach. Bringing Emerson’s metaphysics down to earth, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) asserted that one can live without encumbrances. Emerson wanted to visualize Thoreau as the ideal scholar in action that he had called for in the “American Scholar.”

In the end, however, Emerson regretted Thoreau’s too-private individualism, which failed to signal the vibrant revolution in national consciousness that Emerson had prophesied. For Emerson, what Thoreau lacked, Walt Whitman embodied in full. On reading Leaves of Grass (1855), Emerson saw in Whitman the “prophet of democracy” whom he had sought. Other American Renaissance writers were less optimistic than Emerson and Whitman about the fulfillment of the democratic ideal.

In The Scarlet Letter (1850), Nathaniel Hawthorne concluded that antinomianism such as the “heroics” displayed by Hester Prynne leads to moral anarchy; and Herman Melville, who saw in his story of Pierre (1852) a metaphor for the misguided assumptions of democratic idealism, declared the transcendentalist dream unrealizable. Ironically, the literary vigor with which both Hawthorne and Melville explored the ideal showed their deep sympathy with it even as they dramatized its delusions.

“When Ralph Waldo Emerson pronounced America’s declaration of cultural independence from Europe in his “American Scholar” address.”- is a GMAT reading comprehension passage with answers. Candidates need a strong knowledge of English GMAT reading comprehension.

This GMAT Reading Comprehension consists of 8 comprehension questions. The GMAT Reading Comprehension questions are designed for the purpose of testing candidates’ abilities in understanding, analyzing, and applying information or concepts. Candidates can actively prepare with the help of GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice Questions.

Solution and Explanation

1. The author of the passage seeks primarily to

(A) explore the impact of the American Renaissance writers on the literature of the late 18th Century.
(B) illustrate how American literature of the mid-18th century differed in form from European literature of the same time period.
(C) identify two schools of thought among American Renaissance writers regarding the democratic ideal.
(D) point out how Emerson’s democratic idealism was mirrored by the works of the American Renaissance writers.
(E) explain why the writers of the American Renaissance believed that an ideal world was forming in America.

2. Based on the passage’s information, it can be inferred that Emerson might be characterized as any of the following EXCEPT

(A) a transcendentalist.
(B) an American Renaissance writer.
(C) a public speaker.
(D) a would-be prophet.
(E) a political pragmatist.

3. With which of the following statements about Melville and Hawthorne would the author most likely agree?

(A) Both men were disillusioned transcendentalists.
(B) Hawthorne sympathized with the transcendental dream more so than Melville.
(C) They agreed as to what the transcendentalist dream would ultimately lead to.
(D) Both men believed the idealists to be misguided.
(E) Hawthorne politicized the transcendental ideal, whereas Melville personalized it.

Suggested GMAT Reading Comprehension Samples

• The System of Patent-Granting, Which Confers Temporary Monopolies for the Exploitation of New Technologies
• Traditional Social Science Models of Class Groups in the United States are Based on Economic Status
• Solar Ponds are Bodies of Water in Which Circulation is Incomplete and There is a Very High Salt Concentration that Increases with Depth
• Ethnohistoric Documents from Sixteenth-Century Mexico Suggesting that Weaving and Cooking were the Most Common Productive Activities for Aztec Women
• A Recent Study has Provided Clues to Predator-Prey Dynamics in the Late Pleistocene Era.
• The Black Death, a Severe Epidemic that Ravaged Fourteenth Century Europe
• The United States Government has a Long-Standing Policy of Using Federal Funds to Keep Small Business Viable.
• Comparable Worth, as a Standard Applied to Eliminate Inequities in Pay
• Some Historians Contend that Conditions in the United States During the Second World War
• More Selective than Most Chemical Pesticides in that they Ordinarily Destroy only Unwanted Species
• Historians have Identified Two Dominant Currents in the Russian Women's Movement of the Late Tsarist Period.
• Citing the Fact that the Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita was Higher in 1997
• The General Density Dependence Model can be Applied to Explain the Founding of Specialist Firms
• In the 1980's, Astronomer Bohdan Paczynski Proposed a Way of Determining Whether the Enormous Dark Halo Constituting the Outermost Part of the Milky Way Galaxy
• The United States Hospital Industry is an Unusual Market in that Nonprofit and For-Profit Producers Exist Simultaneously.
• Although the Industrial Union Organizations that Emerged Under the Banner of the Congress of Industrial Organizations
• According to P. F. Drucker, The Management Philosophy Known as Total Quality Management
• The Professionalization of the Study of History in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
• Conventional Wisdom has it that Large Deficits in the United States Budget Cause Interest Rates to Rise.
• In a New Book About the Antiparty Feeling of the Early Political Leaders of the United States