Down and Out with Thoreau: Reversals of Perspective and Paradox in Walden (original) (raw)
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Being One with Nature: The Natural Non-Dual Experience in Thoreau
2019
Este artigo objetiva investigar e desenvolver, de forma necessariamente preliminar, alguns dos nexos poliedricos entre espiritualidade, filosofia, poesia e a experiencia nao-dual com a natureza em alguns pontos da obra poetico-filosofica/espiritual de Henry D. Thoreau. Para tanto, destacaremos algumas de suas poesias, iluminando-as com o instrumental analitico oferecido pelo proprio Thoreau em algumas passagens da sua prosa espiritual/filosofica, ja que para Thoreau, literatura, mitologia, filosofia e poesia sao modulacoes linguisticas possiveis - e necessariamente incompletas - da impossibilidade de se referir de forma explicita aquela experiencia arcaica e simbiotica nao-dual com a natureza.
The Utility of Literature for Self-Reflection and Self-Creation in the Works of Thoreau
impact upon the American ethos is difficult to overstate. The antebellum transcendentalist movement affected American thought and practice in a multitude of ways, and Thoreau's role as a public example of transcendentalist thinking has only magnified the form and content of his preeminent work, Walden. Thoreauvian scholarship is almost as prolific as the amount of misunderstood Thoreau quotes filling bumper stickers, stump speeches, and Twitter feeds, but some themes occur quite frequently. One genus of Thoreauvian scholarship revolves around the idea of the utility of literature as it relates both to self-presentation and the presentation of others (human and non-human) as these relate to the creation or formation of an individual. Thoreau's transcendental focus on the primacy of immediate experience and the unity of the one with the all seem to support scholarship that heads in the direction of literature as an agent of both universal and individual experience. Forough Barani and Wan Yahya's 2010 article in the International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences examined how Thoreau's Walden demonstrates and facilitates self-reflection and, in doing so, is emblematic of the way that literature, in general, can function as a means of introspective maturation. The contemplative aspects of Thoreau's writing are seen best in how Walden is autobiographical. Henrik Otterberg and Steven Hartman approach Thoreau presentation of himself from differing but complementary positions. Otterberg attempts to locate Walden in the broader tradition of American autobiographical writing and, in doing so, demonstrate how Thoreau saw his own experience and character. Steven Hartman argues that the Thoreau of Walden was as much persona as person and that the self-presentation in
Despite its popularity, Walden is a book that is very easily misread." This statement, by the acknowledged 'Godfather' of Thoreau studies, Walter Harding, has proven prophetic countless times since it was first declared in 1975. Walden does, as virtually all texts do, hand itself over to a variety of interpretations. Yet it is this absence of absolute interpretive closure that is at the heart of reader-response criticism. As I will demonstrate in this essay, Thoreau is clearly sensitive to the task of the reader, as well as acutely aware of the phenomenological quality of reading as communication. He therefore offers continuous advice, in a way that is demonstrably phenomenological, on how one should read and respond to the text, firmly disclaiming the validity of any particular interpretation over another. In this, he anticipates phenomenology and its offshoot, reception theory or reader-response criticism, by approximately one hundred years. Although I will be referring to a number of illustrative statements throughout Walden, my main concentration will fall on the chapter appropriately titled "Reading."
"The life excited": Faces of Thoreau in Walden
2020
My work is writing, and I do not hesitate, though I know that no subject is too trivial for me, tried by ordinary standards; for, ye fools, the theme is nothing At the end of Walden the Thoreau persona speculates on his reasons for choosing to leave the woods at the end of the Walden experiment: "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one" (W 323). It seems unlikely somehow that the writer who penned these lines could have imagined at the time just how many lives he would live, and continues to live, not as a universally understood historical or literary figure, but as an enormously variable icon in the culture that has both inherited and shaped him. From a life less than ordinary yet by no means dramatic we have inherited a figure in Thoreau who is variously heroic (and sometimes villainous), an archetype of the environmental hermit, the conscientious ...
'The Life Excited': Faces of Thoreau in WALDEN
THE CONCORD SAUNTERER, N.S. Volume 12/13, 2004/2005, pp. 341-360
My work is writing, and I do not hesitate, though I know that no subject is too trivial for me, tried by ordinary standards; for, ye fools, the theme is nothing, the life is everything. All that interests the reader is the depth and intensity of the life excited.