A DIRECTION OUT THERE. READWALKING (WITH) THOREAU

2005

A READING OF THOREAU’S “WALKING” AS A TRAVEL NARRATIVE CAMILA ALVARES PASQUETTI UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA CATARINA 2005 Supervising Professor: Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins This thesis analyzes Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” first published after his death in 1862, with respect to the history of the United States and European travel accounts in Imperial times. Attentive reader of European nature writers and explorers, Thoreau was recalled by poets and literature writers, and also became celebrated by the field of environmental studies, being referred as founder of ecology. Thoreau’s walks in wilderness, accounted in “Walking,” contradict and at the same time endorse the means through which the United States people were running west at the time: he frequently goes in the same direction, but shows no hurry to get at any place, and calmly searches for what is “holy” along the path. Thoreau’s emphatic discourse against private property confronts the main United State’s principl...

Immersion in the poetry of life and nature secures contact unavailable through detached analysis and observation. The sublime, sacred, and holy lie in intimate experience for Thoreau, and the path from detached observation to immersive contact is a rewarding one for him -- and should be for us, we well.

A criticism of Henry David Thoreau's essay "Walking" and why it shouldn't be taught as a core element of an environmental liberal arts course.

Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 2018

This essay explores the relationship between walking and writing, utilizing performative poetry as an a/r/tographic mode of contemplative inquiry.

Sparked by philosopher Michel de Certeau’s assertion that maps as we know them today are insufficient for describing space as it is constituted by the actual practice of walking through it, I have engaged in a “relationship” with a 1.25-kilometre stretch of a mixed-use recreational trail near to my home in Guelph, Ontario, for four years and counting. This ongoing experience — corporeally, intellectually, affectively — has fundamentally challenged my conception of the trail. Anthropologist Tim Ingold asserts that most maps ever drawn by humans have been ephemeral, traced into the air by hands, etched in the sand by a finger, or scribbled onto​ a scrap of paper by gestures that at once producing the map and replicating the journey. In this presentation, I reflect on my relationship with the trail and consider how alternative approaches to mapping it as I have come to know it might look or sound, and, especially, how one body itself might perform it for others.

In "Walden," Henry David Thoreau famously confronts nature and selfhood in solitary retreat from society. Readers who confront Thoreau usually do so in solitude as well, but on the Internet they can do so socially, discussing as they read. The authors, who teach on different liberal arts campuses, describe their experiences putting their two classes into conversation in the margins of a new, electronic Walden embedded in an online social network. They find that reading Walden this way usefully exposes tensions between self and other, individual and community, that inform both Thoreau s narrative and the activity of reading itself, and they argue that such online engagement can be a valuable addition to traditional, face-to-face discussion.

2017

Wordsworthian poetry is a poetry of movement, and William Wordsworth, who begins his most well-known poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, is a poet much preoccupied with wandering, especially on foot. This paper addresses the significance of walking in Wordsworth’s life and work. Wordsworth walked as he composed, composed as he walked. The poet’s sister Dorothy, for instance, writes to Mrs Clarkson in February 1804 thus: ‘My dear friend, William has been walking and is now writing down the verses he composed in his walk…’. I’m not sure which particular verses Wordsworth wrote on this walk, but the fact of their al fresco composition is by no means unusual. Composing verse and walking went together for Wordsworth. The mere circumstances of poems’ composition, however, do not make them important and I want to argue here that walking was of great thematological significance in the poet’s work. This talk examines some of the key issues raised by walking in Wordsworth’s work, issues to d...