AML
4503: American Romanticism
Spring 2001
Prof. Bruce Harvey
THOREAU'S
WALDEN: QUESTIONS AND KEY PASSAGES
DO
YOU UNDERSTAND THOREAU'S CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM/CONSUMERISM?
49 What happens to the
"self" in the capitalist marketplace?
107/8 Do you agree
that it is possible and necessary to get in touch with essentials of life, as
Thoreau
135/6 argues?
142 Does
his idea about "mud and slush" remind you of other Transcendentalist
writers we've read?
174/7 Who/what does Thoreau most like to bond with?
180/1
DO YOU
NOTICE A PATTERN IN THE IMAGERY RELATED TO WALDEN POND? HOW DOES IT RELATE TO
HIS PREVIOUS ECONOMIC CRITIQUE?
223 How does Walden, as Thoreau describes
it, relate to his previous points about economic waste?
236
232 Does his point about "clean"
fish start to suggest a pattern of ideas?
243 These are key passages, comparing the purity of Walden to the waste
of capitalist enterprise.
244
252 Does his portrait of the wasteful
economy of John Field seem valid?
Does Thoreau seem perhaps
"anal-retentive"--obsessed with self-control, self-reliance, etc. in
comparison to those who, as it
were,
void their muck onto the landscape?
HOW
ENAMORED OF NATURE, IN FACT, IS THOREAU?
248-9 Note the reverential attitude--nature's forms are
marvelous.
311 What is the ultimate point of
"former inhabitant" case histories?
247 Sort out sequence below: wild=clean:
"clean wild ducks."
257 He likes "wildest
scenes"--could eat a woodchuck.
261 But eating meat is "unclean."
265 Indeed, at times we have a too sensual
appetite: "slimy beastly life."
266
267 How does this equation make sense: to
be "continent"=psychosexual closed economy.
268
Thoreau says "Nature is hard to overcome," in a book devoted to
celebrating Nature!? Thoreau wants to escape from the artificiality and servility of consumeristic /
capitalistic society where most "lead lives of quiet desperation"; but
going into the wild, you must be careful not to become wild/animalistic
yourself.
HOW
DOES THOREAU WORK THROUGH RAW ANIMALITY/SPIRITUAL ATTITUDE TOWARD NATURE
TENSION?
352-5
Read the famous thawing sand passage: is this a heroic imaginative
affirmation of life-out-of-muck/body parts or only just a
metaphor?
Like Walden Pond, the sandbank is invested with projected meaning (Ahab
will project meaning onto
Moby-Dick;
but
Melville will be more haunted by the possibility that nature is meaningless)
360-2 Beautiful epiphany as the spring light floods in!
365-6 Perhaps Thoreau can't quite get over obsession with beastliness--is
this bravado?