Henry David Thoreau

The coronavirus pandemic seemed to throw everyone off their path, but by the time spring arrived, I had begun two projects that moved along similar paths and gradually opened in directions I had never anticipated. One was reading and studying Thoreau's Journal, focusing on his studies in botany. The other was hiking in the Valles Caldera National Preserve, twenty miles north of our new home in northern New Mexico. The two paths weren't exactly parallel. Readers of the Journal know that Thoreau was a committed and disciplined traveler, rambling over the neighborhood of Concord several times a week, in daylight and moonlight, by foot, by boat, and by skates. As he comments in the 4 December 1856 Journal entry, he found himself "observing when plants first blossomed and leafed, and I followed it up early and late, far and near, several years in succession, running to different sides of the town and into the neighboring towns, often between twenty and thirty miles in a day. I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened, beside attending to a great many others in different directions and some of them equally distant, at the same time. At the same time I had an eye for birds and whatever else might offer" (Journal IX: 158). The Journal from 1850 to 1861 abundantly shows that Thoreau went "running" all over in search of flowering plants, sometimes in company with Ellery Channing, but most often alone. He called these travels "excursions," and I have come to think of them as botanical excursions. In my reading, that is, plants dominate Thoreau's journal entries, and the plants often lead him to larger reflections on science, literature, and writing.

Una paradoja acecha a este libro. Una tensión entre lo individual y lo colectivo, entre lo trascendente y aquello más inmanente. Jonas Mekas ha sido, probablemente, quien mejor ha representado los logros del cine underground que se llevó a cabo en los Estados Unidos a partir de los años 50. Sin embargo, no se debería caer en personalismos pues el espíritu de entonces le excede. No aceptaremos las ataduras trata precisamente de lo que Mekas comparte con autores como Thoreau y Whitman, de una necesidad de librarse de yugos tremendamente pesados. Con todo, estas resistencias se dan en un territorio donde la mayoría de veces no se consigue dejar testimonio pero, a pesar de ello, este testimonio llega hasta hoy.

O artigo tem dois objetivos. Primeiro, apresentar a gênese histórica do ensaio “Resistência ao Governo Civil”, publicado por Henry David Thoreau em 1849, enfatizando a relação entre as técnicas argumentativas do ensaio e os conceitos utilizados na discussão pública norte-americana sobre antiescravismo e resistência pacífica nas décadas de 30 e 40 do século XIX tal como fomentada por William Lloyd Garrison. Segundo, defender critérios para uma distinção categorial entre “desobediência civil” e “resistência ao governo civil” sensível ao contexto histórico em que o artigo foi escrito.

Several scholars have portrayed Henry David Thoreau as having a blind spot when it came to the persecution and dispossession of Native Americans. One of the articles that set the tone for such essays about his “Indian Problem” (Kucich 2018, in print 2021) is Joshua Bellin’s “In the Company of Savagists”, which alleges that Thoreau’s “attempt to forge a radical position beyond his own civilization depended on the bedrock tenet of that civilization, the displacement and recuperation of an Indian Other” (Bellin 2008: 25). Bellin’s declaration that “It becomes evident that the drama of following in aboriginal footsteps enables him [Thoreau] at once to absorb and to expunge the Indians” (p. 22) even makes it sound as if Thoreau were complicit in genocide. The following gloss on Bellin’s seminal paper shows how he developed his argument by ignoring and eliding passages in Thoreau’s works that disprove his contention that Thoreau never expressed indignation about the abuse of Native Americans or stood up in their defense. By examining Bellin’s omissions and rhetorical tactics, this essay shows how his case against Thoreau is grounded in a presentism that ignores prominent evidence against such an approach to understanding Thoreau’s stance on these complex issues.

By looking at maps that Thoreau copied during his lifetime and identifying the sources of his tracings, this article examines the role that these documents have played in his writing. Using Jacques Rancière's notion of the distribution of the sensible, the article suggests that mapping can be read as a perpetuation of the distribution that delineates and inscribes a common space, but also makes invisible those who do not fit in the distribution. Thoreau's tracings are understood here as a gesture of appropriation that becomes the basis of a politically subversive re-writing of the distribution, in order to make visible the places and the individuals that it excludes.

L'affirmation de l'individu s'avère paradoxale chez Emerson car, qu'il cherche à s'affirmer esthétiquement ou éthiquement, l'individu se nie nécessairement. L'affirmation doit donc passer par la médiation d'un autre qui l'appelle à devenir unique et irremplaçable, c'est-à-dire un Individu. Chez Emerson, cet autre s'incarne chez le poète, cet hétéronyme d'Emerson. Or Emerson conçoit le poète comme un "dieu libérateur", un individu divin qui possède les mêmes attributs que Dieu. Cet article entend ainsi montrer comment Emerson construit, à l'épreuve du texte, une arche divine sous laquelle l'individu est appelé à mener son existence et l'affirmer. Cet habiter divin doit ainsi permettre à l'individu de procéder à la réforme d'une méthode métaphysique enlisée dans l'impasse logique de la pensée normative et de surmonter cette difficulté par le mouvement, non plus unilatéral mais bilatéral, de transcendance.

Society progresses not through acceptance of injustices, in contrary, it progresses through
the courage of few men and women who oppose discrimination and challenge hateful bureaucracies. In the following analysis, three distinctive leaders will be used to understand the difference between non-violent civil disobedience and violent resistance. Following this, they will be used to determine, if ever, an individual faced with an unjust law in moving from non- violent disobedience to violent action is deemed justifiable. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Captain John Brown all share the fundamental experience of being an African American in the United States. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King’s fight for liberty was to not only end the racial segregation in everyday life, but to eliminate the systemic disadvantages the African American community experienced. In contrast, Captain John Brown’s advocacy, justified by leading transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, relied solely on portraying the “willful and wicked” (Thoreau, 1859) violent oppression against African Americans in the United States. This paper will reveal that there is a difference in degree between non-violent civil disobedience and violent resistance. Moreover, that in moving from non-violent to violent action is not a question “about the weapon, but the spirit [and situation] in which you use it” (Thoreau, 1859). Through comparing Martin Luther King’s diplomatic approach for justice with Captain John Brown’s violent resistance, it will become clear that Brown’s violence was required and unavoidable. Revealing that Martin Luther King’s philosophy was not applicable within the society Brown was in. This paper will then compare Malcolm X’s Ballots or the Bullets with Thoreau’s Plea for Captain John Brown. Through using A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, it will become clear that violent resistance was not justifiable in Malcolm X’s case, and that the degree of injustice and consequences of violent action must first be evaluated.

boekhoofdstuk (hier als preview van 4 bladzijden) in:
NATUUR ALS MISVERSTAND - THOREAU OP TIENGEMETEN.
SAMENSTELLING & REDACTIE JELLE REUMER,
Historische Uitgeverij 2017 - zie ook informatie van de uitgever op
http://www.historischeuitgeverij.nl/hu.php?is=0249

an old student paper) Defenders and detractors of John Brown may disagree about many things, but few will deny that he was, at the very least, a fascinating character. In his lifetime he was even more famous-more loved and more loathed-than he is now. From the Transcendentalists to the governor who hanged him, from the Union soldiers to Ku Klux Klan members, people have been fascinated by him. Why is this? It isn't only because of his daring raid on Harpers Ferry, for other men have done daring things without becoming objects of fascination. Rather, the cult of John Brown seems to derive from his singlemindedness, his unshakeable conviction of righteousness, his willingness to commit violence in pursuit of a noble end (a holy end, for him), combined with his intelligence, his eloquence, his courage. In short, what intrigues people, at least implicitly, is the contrast between him and his age. He had integrity, he was an old Puritan, an anachronistic Puritan from the days of Oliver Cromwell, he was "authentic"; his age was hypocritical, confused, self-estranged (as evidenced by its Civil War). This is the impression one gets from the outraged literature of the time, 1 and from the testaments of Brown's character given by Thoreau, Emerson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry A. Wise (governor of Virginia), and others. 2 In this paper I will investigate such claims. That is, I will explore the relation between Brown and his age, between Brown and the Transcendentalists in particular, in the hope that doing so will yield insights not only into the phenomena I'm 'directly' discussing (namely the Transcendentalists, Brown, and their society) but also into the meaning and nature of "authenticity" itself, this concept which is central to Brown's mystique.

This chapter explores terms that are central to this study: religion, spirituality, nature religion, green religion, and dark green religion. Although this sort of linguistic labor may seem most pertinent to those with backgrounds in anthropology and religious studies, it should be even more valuable to those with little background in the academic study of religion. The rationale for this starting point is simple: terminology matters. It shapes methods and focuses attention in illuminating ways. Terminology also carries assumptions that may occlude phenomena that might well be relevant to any given inquiry. It is important in this investigation, therefore, to reflect critically on the terms employed.

This fourth chapter of THOREAU'S BOTANY asks how plants and plant-thinking function in WALDEN. By examining Journal sources for several key passages in which plants appear, I argue that the role of botany in Thoreau's masterpiece is vital. Key passages are "The Bean-Field" and the sand foliage passage in "Spring."

In semem Buch «Screening History» stellt Gore Vidal fest, Hollywood sei zur Lingua franca des 20. Jahrhunderts geworden. Freuds berühmtes Diktum umformulierend, erklärt er: «Heute, wo Literatur war, ist Kino geworden.» Von der kulturellen Brisanz des Mainstreams Hollywoods ausgehend, lässt sich vermuten, dass wir in einer Zeit leben, in der historische und politische Realität immer aufdringlicher in Fiktion umgeschrieben und als solche kulturell vertrieben wird. Eine historische Erinnerung lebt – vielleicht nicht nur, aber vornehmlich – durch ihre filmisch-fiktionale Aufbereitung weiter. Qhne den Kulturpessimismus eines Horkheimer und Adorno zu bemühen, ist doch die kulturelle Brisanz populärer Kunstformen unübersehbar geworden, scheint es dennoch zweifellos wichtig, den Begriff des «reality check» in die unsaubere Schnittfläche zwischen politischen Realitäten und deren kultureller Umsetzung wieder einzuführen. Und weil diese Realitäten immer im Zusammenhang mit Phantasien stehen – im imaginären Bereich ausgehandelt und umformuliert werden –, scheint es heute zudem wieder von besonderer Dringlichkeit, den Traumcharakter jener Werte, an denen wir im Westen unser Leben und unser Handeln messen, hervorzuheben. Deshalb sollen die folgenden Überlegungen zum «American Dream » als Bestandteil jenes vitalen kulturellen Transformationsprozesses verstanden werden, den man eine Globalisierung der amerikanischen Unterhaltungskultur nennen könnte. Denn obgleich man heute eher geneigt ist, für den Dialog zwischen Amerika und Europa eher die Differenzen und Unstimmigkeiten zwischen diesen beiden Kulturen herauszuarbeiten, ist es doch offensichtlich, dass auf der Ebene der Populärkliltur ein fast nahtloser Austausch existiert.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, market capitalism replaced socialism in Eastern Europe. Supposedly, the new economic logic would allocate resources impartially, allowing the possibility of prosperity for those who worked hard. What happened instead is that citizens from Russia to Romania, Serbia to Albania poured billions of dollars into pyramid schemes advertising astronomical returns. These investment vehicles never explained how they would produce such wealth. In fact, the leaders commonly employed religious rhetoric to convince people to simply have faith and turn over their cash. When the schemes inevitably crashed, riots broke out. Following Michael Taussig’s work with newly proletarianized workers in South America, anthropologists like Katherine Verdery and Jean and John Comaroff have documented how magic and the occult always accompany the cool calculus of modern life. A baker’s dozen of humanities scholars have now brought that insight to the fields of literature, histo...

From a corpus of 37 caves in the province of Castellón (Spain), we establish a classification in 17 themed typologies of legends (and other narrative texts of oral transmission), from which the presence and possibilities are studied of popular culture in education. field, linked to the knowledge of the territory.
We present three basic ways of accessing these natural and legendary spaces: the visit to the caves in search of the oral story, the preparation of interdisciplinary school projects that use the background of these caves and the use of children's literature set in these natural spaces.
It is concluded by highlighting the effectiveness of project-based work on elements of the oral transmission literature, on-the-road tours and literary routes through the natural landscape of the caves with legendary references.

Gerechtigkeit sollte die Grundlage allen politischen Handelns sein. Doch was, wenn staatliche Maßnahmen und Gesetze dieser Norm widersprechen? Können dann auch in Demokratien Akte des zivilen Ungehorsams gerechtfertigt sein? Und wenn ja, unter welchen Bedingungen? Dieser Band versammelt erstmals die zentralen Positionen einer Debatte, die von Thoreau über Gandhi und Martin Luther King, über John Rawls, Hannah Arendt und Jürgen Habermas bis zur Occupy-Bewegung führt. Auch kritische Stimmen kommen zu Wort, denen ziviler Ungehorsam mal zu viel, mal zu wenig Widerstand bedeutet.

En entendant un oiseau que je recherchais, je me suis retourné pour l'examiner, quand j'ai perçu un aboiement derrière moi et me retournant de nouveau, j'ai vu un vieux renard en haut de la colline, sur le flanc ouest de la vallée, parmi les buissons, à une dizaine de perches de distance, qui baissait les yeux vers moi. Au début ç'a été un bref aboiement de chiot, mais ensuite l'animal s'est mis à glapir sur une note plus élevée et soutenue, pas du tout comme un chien, un burar-r-r éraillé, à demi hurlé. […] Voir cette parente du loup décrire un cercle autour de moi dans le bois clairsemé, s'arrêter de temps à autre pour m'observer et glapir-quel spectacle sauvage ! Henry David THOREAU, Journal, 20 mai 1858 1 .

The phenomenon of “tiny houses,” loosely defined as dwellings ranging between 65 and 120 square feet, has rapidly accumulated interest among economically and environmentally conscious individuals. The movement’s recent popularity highlights the commodification of sustainability in a market that continues to shelter economic and class privilege, despite that the movement itself emerges from a desire to consume less and contribute to community more.
Reading recent rhetoric surrounding the movement – with particular attention to the movement’s invocations of Henry David Thoreau – this essay examines the ways in which tiny house living contradicts its own rhetorical claims. However, in that contradiction, the movement has the potential to build a responsive environmental ethic as it focalizes dissonance between green-washing rhetoric and the complex realities of tiny house living. In fact, the experience of living in a tiny house may be even more Thoreauvian than the movement acknowledges with regard to issues of mobility and waste. Drawing from my position as builder, owner and inhabitant of a tiny house, as well as foundational sociological and environmental scholarship, this paper examines the tiny house movement’s privileged foundations but also investigates its potency for environmental and social justice issues, urban sustainability strategies, and land ethics.
https://books.google.com/books?id=m-G8BQAAQBAJ&pg=PA164&dq=From+Sustainable+to+Resilient+Cities:+Global+Concerns/Urban+Efforts_.+Research+in+Urban+Studies.+Bingley:+Emerald+P,&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3VrlVMLdF4HzoASl8IGICA&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

From the Publisher's abstract:

Through an original and close reading of the key literature regarding both revolutionary violence and nonviolence, this book collapses the widely-assumed concepts of violence and nonviolence as mutually exclusive. By revealing that violence and nonviolence are braided concepts arising from human action, Peyman Vahabzadeh submits that in many cases the actions deemed to be either violent or nonviolent might actually produce outcomes that are not essentially different.

Vahabzadeh offers a conceptual phenomenology of the key thinkers and theorists of both revolutionary violence and various approaches to nonviolence. Arguing that violence is inseparable from civilizations, Violence and Nonviolence concludes by making a number of original conceptualizations regarding the relationship between violence and nonviolence, exploring the possibility of a nonviolent future and proposing to understand the relationship between the two concepts as concentric, not opposites.

In the field of environmental history, Henry David Thoreau has come to symbolize the arrival of a preservationist ethos in American culture. His retreat to a secluded house in Walden woods, his book Walden, and essay "Walking," and millions of journal words about the Concord and New England landscape have all suggested 10

Wilderness as a concept emerged as a way of thinking about nature with the beginnings of a pastoral way of living around twelve thousand years ago.  It was conceived as a region where one was likely to get into a confused, disordered, or “wild” condition, but it is now commonly defined as uncultivated and otherwise undeveloped land.  This essay investigates how wilderness is represented, and any associated limitations, in Jon Krakauer’s non-fictional account and Sean Penn’s film adaptation of Chris McCandless’s journey Into the Wild. Firstly, the Alaskan wilderness is treated as a sanctuary, separate from “civilisation”, a place where the “civilised” individual can retreat to escape from the perils of ordinary life. Secondly, Into the Wild continues the literary tradition of portraying wilderness as antagonist to man and his works, and a relentless environment that needs to be “tamed” and “conquered”.  Thirdly, wilderness is exclusive, following on from the American pioneering tradition, as a “frontier” reserved for the individual white American male. Lastly, it suggests the existence of a pure and pristine wilderness that is devoid of other human inhabitants and a history. All of these themes impose limitations on our understanding of “wilderness”.

Henry David Thoreau 's ideas about sound and music were 150 years ahead of their time. He developed a proto-theory of ambient sound, and expressed the concept of the acoustic niche. He understood sound as signaling presence, and he was especially interested in echolocation, as were some important American painters in the middle of the 19th century. Sound, he concluded, was the only language without metaphor. This article was published as a chapter in the book in Current Directions in Ecomusicology (Routledge), edited by Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe, is an expanded version of a presentation I gave at the 2012 Ecomusicologies conference, in New Orleans.

Quelle est la nature du travail ? Oui ou non est‐il le propre du phénomène humain ? Offre‐t‐il vraiment un sens à notre existence terrestre, voire à ce qui pourrait lui faire suite ? Seule une approche anthropologique articulant les éléments historiques et critiques appropriés permet de comprendre son rôle actuel, son histoire, et son futur. Une telle visée (certains parleraient de hauteur de vue) dévoile instantanément les enjeux et dessine l'horizon de l'action politique au XXI e siècle. Si cette visée était cultivée citoyennement, elle indiquerait comment et pourquoi créer les situations qui s'imposent pour tenir grand compte des nouvelles réalités de la guerre des classes. Lorsque Winston Churchill promet à ses concitoyens « du sang, du labeur, des larmes et de la sueur 2 », il ignore probablement qu'au même moment le gouvernement nazi prétend pour sa part que « le travail rend libre 3 ». Son ton oraculaire, quasiment biblique, donne à penser que la condition humaine ne peut s'envisager en dehors des catégories de châtiment et de pénitence. Nous allons le voir, il y a toujours une théologie du travail à l'oeuvre dans les errances historiques de l'homo sapiens. Afin de simplifier la discussion, il était inévitable de se concentrer sur une histoire et il était expédient de penser l'histoire européenne. Bien que cette double réduction apparaisse de plus en plus inacceptable aux chercheurs avertis de la richesse des cultures, elle est tout à fait expédiente dans le cadre d'une enquête portant sur les liens incestueux existant entre technique, technoscience, aliénation et impérialisme. 2 « I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. » (Winston Churchill, lors de son premier discours devant la Chambre des communes en tant que Premier ministre du Royaume‐Uni, le 13 mai 1940 ; voir http://www.winstonchurchill.org.) 3 Le bon mot « Arbeit macht frei » fut affiché à l'entrée de nombreux camps de concentration en juin 1940, à l'instigation du Général SS Theodor Eicke.

The American Romanticists of the mid-19th century may not have held a monopoly on being the first literary authors to opine about nature’s vast beauty, overwhelming immensity and humbling simplicity, but they were a generation of writers that had the ability, thanks to the enlightened and provable facts and ideals of science and philosophy, to understand that man was “a part of nature, and of the proper relationship between him and the rest of created things” (Krutch 14).

Nature, in all of its resplendent boundless innate beauty, wonder and immensity, from sea to shining sea, provided Concord’s most famous literary giants, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, with the inspiration and impetus to let their imaginations flourish with wild and creative abandon and to capture, on paper for the first time, the personal sentiments that made man recognize its eternal bond with the natural world and at long last give American’s their own literary genre that spoke to their affinity for the land and a nation they were proud to call home.

I read Henry David Thoreau as an environmental virtue theorist.  In this paper, I use Thoreau’s work as a tool to explore the relation between the virtue of greatness of soul and environmental virtues.  Reflecting on connections between Thoreau’s texts and historical discussions of greatness of soul, or magnanimity, I offer a novel conception of magnanimity.  I argue that (1) to become magnanimous, most individuals need to acquire the environmental virtue of simplicity; and (2) magnanimous individuals must possess the environmental virtue of benevolence in order to achieve their goals.

The Romantic Era of the mid-19th century introduced America to its first distinct form of national literature that brought worldwide recognition to its prominent authors and their works. Yet for hundreds of years prior the continent produced various literary styles that emanated from native tribes and European explorers to revolutionary heroes and leaders, culminating in a vast treasure trove of history that stood as a precursor to what lay ahead.

The natives of North America, absent of their own written vocabularies, passed down their histories, tales, myths and legends to their younger generations by word of mouth. Later, European settlers, after sailing across the vast Atlantic Ocean and reaching the shores of the
North American continent, would write their own accounts of their findings and eventually decipher and translate the native’s stories into the myriad languages of the western and non-western world.

Late 18th century American literature would be full of patriotic fervor from the writings of Thomas Paine, who would help rally General George Washington’s troops and bring new energy and hope to the American cause of independence and freedom. By the early 19th century,
and after a second conflict with England, the nascent American nation was ready to sink its teeth into a newly-found national literature that would introduce the Romantic Era while its prominent authors would write about heroic hard-fought battles for democracy, the vast frontiers, and imaginative spine-tingling tales.

It would be nature, though, in all of its resplendent boundless natural beauty, wonder and immensity, from sea to shining sea, that would provide the inspiration and impetus for two literary giants of this era, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, to let their imaginations flourish with wild creative abandon and to capture, on paper for the first time, the personal sentiments that made man recognize its eternal bond with the natural world and at long last give American’s their own literary genre that spoke to their affinity for the land and a nation they were proud to call home.

This essay will glance at some of the most relevant environmental landmarks from the historical point of view, as well as the most significant literary works that have discussed the issue. The purpose of this study is to trace the evolution of environmental awareness through literature since the first literary writings until the emergence of Transcendentalism and its influence later on Ecocriticism. By means of an analysis, both of the precedent chronology of Transcendentalism and the movement itself, it will be established the evolution of the so-called “Ecocriticism”. The outcome of the analysis will show the origin of Ecocriticism as well as the direct relation of this field of study with the literary and philosophical movement created centuries ago by Ralph Waldo Emerson and followed by Henry David Thoreau.

This article aims to provide a historical summary of the eco-critical situation from its origins to recent acquisitions, focusing on both the comparative and aesthetics of reception aspects of this new approach to literary analysis and criticism.

Mohandas Gandhi is civil disobedience’s most original theorist and most influential mythmaker. As a newspaper editor in South Africa, he chronicled his experiments with satyagraha by drawing parallels to ennobling historical precedents. Most enduring of these were Socrates and Henry David Thoreau. The genealogy Gandhi invented in these years has become a cornerstone of contemporary liberal narratives of civil disobedience as a continuous tradition of conscientious appeal ranging from Socrates to King to Rawls. One consequence of this contemporary canonization of Gandhi’s narrative, however, has been to obscure the radical critique of violence that originally motivated it. This essay draws on Edward Said’s account of travelling theory to unsettle the myth of doctrine that has formed around civil disobedience. By placing Gandhi’s genealogy in the context of his critique of modern civilization, as well as his formative but often-overlooked encounter with the British women’s suffrage movement, it reconstructs Gandhi’s paradoxical notion that sacrificial political action is the fullest expression of self-rule. For Gandhi, Socrates and Thoreau exemplify civil disobedience as a fearless practice of fidelity to truth profoundly at odds with liberal conceptions of disobedience as fidelity to law.

From the century of independence to the contemporary, Montaigne acted as an influential voice in the ongoing transatlantic conversation that shaped the American identity. This special issue offers a series of transhistorical and interdisciplinary studies that draw the dense network of contexts, uses and meanings assumed by Montaigne’s figure and work in America, along different fields (literature, philosophy, political theory, and gender studies).