Above time : Emerson's and Thoreau's temporal revolutions / James R. Guthrie.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Guthrie, James R. (James Robert)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo.

Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862.

Thoreau, Henry David.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Time in literature.

Time.

Physical Description:

xi, 262 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Columbia : University of Missouri Press, [2001]

Summary:

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 reached 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.

Contents:

1. A History of Time: Emerson and Lyell, Agassiz, and Darwin 6

2. "My Carnac" and Memnon's Head: Temporal Reform and Timely Memorials in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers 46

3. Circles and Lines: Emerson's Parade of Days 92

4. The Walking Stick, the Surveyor's Staff, and the Corn in the Night: Thoreau's Alternative Temporal Indices 131

5. Answering the Sphinx: The Evolution of the Emersonian Metamorphosis 173

6. Inches' Wood: Thoreau's Re-membered Cultural Landscape 201

7. Extemporaneous Man, Representative Man 235.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 253-257) and index.

ISBN:

0826213731

OCLC:

47893084