Author: John Mattison

Above all else that I learned about in this class, the connections made back to authors were by far the most profound. In other classes before this the author was never ignored, but was usually only mentioned as a context for the historical time period and how the mentality of the general people was influenced at the time. In this class we looked into the author as an extension of their work, allowing what we knew about them to leak into the themes we could extrapolate from their writing. It started off in an unavoidable fashion,  as Walden was autobiographical which made it hard to avoid bringing the author up. But other stories such as The Importance of Being Earnest brought up discussions about homosexuality that could be heavily supported with background knowledge on Oscar Wilde, as well as similar discussions with Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf. An author, their personality, their lives, and when and where they live(d) all have a huge impact on the theorycraft that can come up relating to their stories. An author and their identity can’t be separated from their work and still allow for the full scope of their artistic vision. Continue reading “Final Reflection”

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm

Throughout Alice in Wonderland, Alice goes through multiple changes that change the way she views herself and the world, such as drastically changing size. She, of course, finds this very confusing and unusual, and holds these opinions up to the point where she meets the caterpillar in Chapter v. Advice from a Caterpillar. Here, she is confronted by someone, the Caterpillar, who believes that nothing she says it out of the ordinary, and that there is nothing wrong with her situation. It’s at this point that we can see the differences in mindsets of various people can change how we view our identity, as we see if the Caterpillar had been going through the same changes he would’ve felt no significant change in his identity.

“‘Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,’ said Alice; ‘but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?’

‘Not a bit,’ said the Caterpillar.

‘Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,’ said Alice; ‘all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.’”

This shows the influence of how we feel about different things on how we view our identity, and the identity of others.

The passage I’ll be talking about is paragraph 16 of the Where I Lived, What I Lived For passage of Walden. This section marks the shift from Henry David Thoreau’s personal experience of living in the woods for a period of time to his theory on how a similar experience could enlighten someone else like it did for him. He went through living in the woods so he might “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,” and makes it necessary to shift into theory when discussing how he felt society could benefit from this. Continue reading “Thoreau and the Understanding of Exception”