Tuesday

10/14 in-class writing prompt

10/15 page 178

10/16 page 194

10/17 page 228

10/20 in-class writing

10/21page 245

10/22 page 261

10/23 page 288

10/24 page308

10/27 work on dialectical journals

10/28 Finish book

10/29  work on essay  

Today let's think about the following. We will also look at "Civil Disobedience". I'm going to move the in-class writing until tomorrow.

 

1.) Does Walden appeal to our "sense of rebelliousness and individualism"? Are we "inspired by his idealistic actions and principled and good-humored erudition"? Do we enjoy thinking about how we might take a more "Thoreauvian approach" to our own lives?

2.) How do modern conveniences and gadgets influence our culture? After reading Thoreau, are we now eager to give them up?

3.) Can we consider how doing and thinking for ourselves is made possible (or impeded) by modern educational and cultural institutions?

4.) To which "genre" (or genres) does Walden belong?

5.) What is Thoreau's relationship to his audience and to society as a whole? How does he situate his narrative persona? That is, what kind of person is the "I" in the text, and how do we know?

6.) How can Walden be considered as an application of Transcendental philosophy?

 

We need to start to discuss some examples of rhetorical devices in Walden.

Anaphora  -
“We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.” (Winston Churchill)

Apart from the function of giving prominence to certain ideas, the use of anaphora in literature adds rhythm, thus making it more pleasurable to read, and easier to remember. As a literary device, anaphora serves the purpose of giving artistic effect to passages of prose and poetry.
As a rhetorical device, anaphora is used to appeal to the emotions of the audience, in order to persuade, inspire, motivate, and encourage them.

ANTITHESIS: (from literarydevices.net)

Antithesis, literal meaning opposite, is a rhetorical device in which two opposite ideas are put together in a sentence to achieve a contrasting effect.

Antithesis emphasizes the idea of contrast by parallel structures of the contrasted phrases or clauses, i.e. the structures of phrases and clauses are similar in order to draw the attention of the listeners or readers. For example:

“Setting foot on the moon may be a small step for a man but a giant step for mankind.”

The use of contrasting ideas, “a small step” and “a giant step”, in the sentence above emphasizes the significance of one of the biggest landmarks of human history.

OTHER EXAMPLES:

 Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

• Man proposes, God disposes.
• Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing.
• Speech is silver, but silence is gold.
• Patience is bitter, but it has a sweet fruit.
• Money is the root of all evils: poverty is the fruit of all goodness.
• You are easy on the eyes, but hard on the heart.

 Allusion (everywhere).

parallelism
parables, aphorisms, symbols, diction and syntax.

CHAPTER 2 - "Where I Lived and What For"

He goes to Walden Pond because he wishes to live deliberately, to slow down the fast pace of modern life and actually enjoy it.  He claims that you can't learn anything from newspapers about live ("The Revolution will not be Televised")

Quotes:
"As long as possible live free and uncommitted.  It makes little difference whether you are committed to a farm or a county jail."

"Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.  Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.  Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering?"

"The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life."

"I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.  How could I have looked him in the face?"

"Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity."

"We do not ride on the railroads; it rides upon us."

"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?"

"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip."

"Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature."

"I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."

Chapter 3 READING

Reading literature is the closest thing to living.

Reading great books requires training such training as athletes undergo.

Nothing truly can be translated.

"Most men have learned to read to serve paltry convenience, as they learned to ciper in order to keep accounts... but reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a higher sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury .. but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to."

"The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers."

"I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannont read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects."

"We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment."

Chapter 4 SOUNDS 

This is a strange, but poetic chapter that focuses on the sounds that Thoreau hears when living at Walden (and how the sounds make him feel).  There is this idea of Thoreau's that most of humanity doesn't quite listen to its soundings.  To be in-tune with the place you live is - in part - to listen closely to it, to hear it, and perhaps to respond to what you hear.

Chapter 4 - "Sounds"

This is a strange, but poetic chapter that focuses on the sounds that Thoreau hears when living at Walden (and how the sounds make him feel).  There is this idea of Thoreau's that most of humanity doesn't quite listen to its soundings.  To be in-tune with the place you live is - in part - to listen closely to it, to hear it, and perhaps to respond to what you hear.

Micah has too really good dialectical journals on this chapter:

#16: "Much is published, but little is printed" p. 108

By published, Thoreau means made public, as in, anyone can observe/hear. There are so many sounds and things of that nature that are able to be observed, each with their own meaning and cause, but very few care to listen, and fewer still, care to write them down. This continues the thought that man uses nature only for what it can get out of it, and tries its best to remove itself from it. Mankind in general doesn't care about the chirping of a bird, or the chirping of crickets. When they do care, it is as an annoyance, a reminder of the world they seek to leave behind by becoming civilized.

#17: The train

In the 'Sounds' chapter, Thoreau goes to great lengths to personify the train that he talks about. How it perspires steam, how it must put on snow shoes, etc. This is done because in a way, the train represents a concentration of what makes humans terrible, at least to Thoreau. They are cold, calculated, used to transport things from one end of the world to another, all the while cutting surgically precise lines through the wilderness that Thoreau believes greater than man. It is a machine made for business, and the making of money on the backs of those who are too lazy and too luxurious to get what they need from the land around them.

"I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe." (116)

"Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling.   I am more alone than ever.  For the rest of the afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway."  (119)

Chapter 5 - "Solitude"

Thoreau makes a case for nature being a better companion than humans.

"I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.  To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.  I love to be alone.  I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude." (131)

"Next to use the grandest laws are continually being executed.  Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman, who work we are." (130)

39. "If the bell rings why should we run?" page 95

This quote applies to our every day life as well as back then. Except now it relates to the phone or the chime of an email. Why do we feel a relentless sense of urgency to respond? Why should our stress level climb with each new message? Rather ignore the next text message that comes in, take a breath, and ask yourself "why should I run?".

41. The title of Thoreau’s most important work is selfless in name. By naming the book after a pond, Walden, rather than “Thoreau’s experiment” he emphasises nature rather than humanity. This focuses on Thoreau’s theme of non conformity and honing in to the simple and important motions of life. Throughout Walden Thoreau argues that Americans spend too much of their time focusing on obtaining materialistic wealth without appreciating to the true beauty of life which can be displayed in nature. This title goes against American’s view of life thus challenging the reader to think differently and break from American conformity.
     
    Mina - 
     “Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt narrow to the parts of the universe and to those eras in history which would most attracted me. where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers.” (pg 85). This is one of Thoreau’s quotes that most connects with the ideas of transcendentalism, nature, and timelessness that flow through this chapter. These ideas are Thoreau ascending to a higher thought that tries to escape the capitalism and materialism that are pushed in today’s society. He is trying to reconnect with nature and with the consciousness of the underverse instead of just what individual people can achieve.