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eBook details

• Title: Leaving Walden.
• Author : Nineteenth-Century Prose
• Release Date : January 22, 2004
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 223 KB

Description

In Walden, Thoreau claims that he "went to the woods" because he wanted "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life." Yet he seems to have found it impossible to stay put at Walden Pond or to stay away from Concord for much longer than a day or two, even though he enjoyed his woodland idyll greatly and saw the village as a fountainhead of conformity and factitiousness. But this is less a contradiction than a deliberate strategy: by pretending to be a stranger to his native place, Thoreau is able to offer a critical portrait of Concord that highlights its comic absurdities, which he treats as symptomatic of American culture as a whole. His understanding of the unnatural folkways of his old friends and neighbors has features in common with contemporary ideas about the social construction of reality, though unlike today's social constructionists he does not see "nature" as an entirely arbitrary term. Indeed, for him nature provides a yardstick for measuring the credulity and prejudice of his peers. Hence his ironic adoption of the perspective of natural history when he describes the men and boys of Concord in "The Village," and hence his use of grotesque exaggeration elsewhere in Walden to highlight the surreal character of much that passes as ordinary in the daily life of Americans. Hence as well his subjection of his native ground to a still more outlandish form of scrutiny in "Ktaadn," where he describes his travels beyond the north woods frontier and his discovery of the traces of civilized life--including a copy of an essay by Emerson and an advertisement for a clothing store--in the midst of the Maine wilderness. He subjects these traces to a form of scrutiny that might be called "natural deconstruction," illustrating once again his willingness to question the preoccupations and presumptions of his culture in order to call attention to the inadequacy of its worldview. **********

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