Above Time: Emerson's and Thoreau's Temporal RevolutionsUniversity of Missouri Press, 2001 - 262 pages "In Above Time, James R. Guthrie explores the origins of the two preeminent transcendentalists' revolutionary approaches to time, as well as to the related concepts of history, memory, and change. Most critical discussions of this period neglect the important truth that the entire American transcendentalist project involved a transcendence of temporality as well as of materiality. Correspondingly, both writers call in their major works for temporal reform, to be achieved primarily by rejecting the past and future in order to live in an amplified present moment. Emerson and Thoreau were compelled to see time in a new light by concurrent developments in the sciences and the professions. Geologists were just then hotly debating the age of the earth, while zoologists were beginning to unravel the mysteries of speciation, and archaeologists were deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs. These discoveries worked collectively to enlarge the scope of time, thereby helping pave the way for the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Well aware of these wider cultural developments, Emerson and Thoreau both tried (although with varying degrees of success) to integrate contemporary scientific thought with their preexisting late-romantic idealism. As transcendentalists, they already believed in the existence of "correspondences"--Affinities between man and nature, formalized as symbols. These symbols could then be decoded to discover the animating presence in the world of eternal laws as pervasive as the laws of science. Yet unlike scientists, Emerson and Thoreau hoped to go beyond merely understanding nature to achieving a kind of passionate identity with it, and they believed that such a union might be achieved only if time was first recognized as being a purely human construct with little or no validity in the rest of the natural world. Consequently, both authors employ a series of philosophical, rhetorical, and psychological strategies designed to jolt their readers out of time, often by attacking received cultural notions about temporality."--Publishers website |
Contents
6 | |
Temporal Reform | 46 |
Emersons Parade of Days | 92 |
The Walking Stick the Surveyors Staff and the Corn | 131 |
The Evolution of the Emersonian | 173 |
Thoreaus Remembered Cultural | 201 |
Extemporaneous Man Representative Man | 235 |
253 | |
259 | |
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Above Time: Emerson's and Thoreau's Temporal Revolutions James Robert Guthrie No preview available - 2001 |
Common terms and phrases
Agassiz Amoskeag Falls ancient antiquity appears artist become brothers chapter chronologic Concord consciousness corn growing cultural landscape Darwin despite discovery divine earth Egyptian Emer Emersonian essay eternity existence experience extemporaneous fact figure finally forest future geologic geologists Goethe Gould growth Henry David Thoreau Henry Thoreau human idea ideal individual intellectual journal entry Kouroo Lamarck land language leaf least linear live Lyell man’s measure memory Merrimack Rivers metamorphosis metaphor Moreover natural history nature's Nevertheless night Nilometer observation organic Origin of Species original Ovid passage past pines plant poem poet present Principles progress Ralph Waldo Emerson reader represented rhetorical Richardson river rose Schama scientific Self-Reliance sense species spirit suggests surveyor swamp symbolic teleology term theory things Thoreau says thought time's Time’s Arrow tion transcendental transcendentalists trees trope uniformitarian Uriel Walden Pond Walking Week wild woods writing wrote