In paragraph 12 of “Solitude,” Thoreau describes his experience of being alone, as at this point of his life he is still living by himself in the woods. He does this in a very intriguing way; he starts with his experience and from that, moves up one level of abstraction and into theory. He does this by him stating his opinion first, which is that he loves the idea of being by himself and doesn’t really seem to enjoy other’s company. Then, he takes what he has experienced for himself, being alone, and turns it into a general claim on what loneliness really means. He shifts his language and instead of using the word, “I,” changes it to “we,” to encompass all of society in his generalization. Continue reading “Thoreau’s Idea of Loneliness”
Thoreau and the Understanding of Exception
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”
Tuesday theme – My Country Used To Be
Today’s theme song for ENGL 203-04 is “My Country Used to Be,” written and performed here by jazz singer-songwriter Dave Frishberg. Frishberg composed the song in the aftermath of the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The mood of Frishberg’s song is quite different from that of Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government,” written in protest of both slavery and the U.S. war with Mexico. Thoreau’s essay expresses outrage; this feels more like a lament. Despite the difference in mood, both express dissatisfaction with things as they are. Frishberg’s point of comparison is America as (he believes) it once was, while Thoreau’s is a “higher law” that America has failed to meet since its birth as a state whose founding legal document countenanced slavery.
Both represent contributions to the “unending conversation” among citizens of the United States as to what their country is, has been, and should be.
Thoreau makes his contribution through argument, using his night in jail (for refusing to pay the poll tax) as a springboard to explore the circumstances under which we do or don’t owe the law, or the state, our allegiance. Frishberg makes his contribution by re-purposing a patriotic melody — “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” — to convey his vision of an America that has lost its way.
Interestingly, we might understand Frishberg’s contribution to the conversation as itself an act of “resistance” or “civil disobedience.” In effect, he occupies “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (as well as “Yankee Doodle Dandy”) in much the way street protesters occupy public spaces for a march or demonstration.
By occupying patriotic music with subversive intent, Frishberg participates in a venerable tradition. Even “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” belongs to this tradition, consisting as it does of lyrics praising America put to the tune of “God Save The Queen,” a patriotic song of America’s former colonial ruler, Great Britain.
“The Star Spangled Banner” has been occupied many times. In 1844, two years before Thoreau’s arrest in Concord, the abolitionist newspaper Song of Liberty published E.A. Atlee’s powerful four-verse “Oh Say, Do You Hear?” Here’s just the first verse:
Oh, say do you hear, at the dawn’s early light,
The shrieks of those bondmen, whose blood is now streaming
From the merciless lash, while our banner in sight
With its stars, mocking freedom, is fitfully gleaming?
Do you see the backs bare? Do you mark every score
Of the whip of the driver trace channels of gore?
And say, doth our star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?
You can read the other three verses (and hear “Oh Say, Do You Hear?” performed) on the website Star Spangled Music, which provides an extensive guide to the history and cultural significance of the national anthem.
One of the boldest and most remarkable recent occupations of the anthem was executed in 2008 by jazz singer René Marie, invited to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” before Denver mayor John Hickenlooper’s State of the City address. She plugged in the words to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as “The Black National Anthem.” The mayor was not amused, and the governor, Bill Ritter, labeled the performance “disrespectful.”
Felix Contreras discusses Marie’s and four other memorable performances of the national anthem in his 2009 report for National Public Radio, “The Many Sides Of ‘The Star Spangled Banner.'” At least three of these performances (by José Feliciano, Jimi Hendrix, and Marvin Gaye) might also be seen as occupations of a kind — not through the substitution of new words for the traditional ones, but simply through their re-interpretations of the melody. Listening to Feliciano’s quiet and soulful version, performed before Game 5 of the 1968 World Series, it’s hard to believe that he, too, was accused of disrespect. Was it really his version of the music people objected to? Or was it the fact of his laying claim simultaneously to his Puerto Rican and American identities through the re-mixing of musical traditions?
One may also wonder how much any of those who found Feliciano’s rendition disrespectful actually knew of the anthem’s history, and whether any of them realized how distant their idea of a “normal” rendition was from the way it would have been performed in Francis Scott Key’s time.
Thursday theme – Different Drum
Today’s theme song in ENGL 203-04 is “Different Drum,” written in 1965 by Michael Nesmith and performed most famously by Linda Ronstadt as lead singer of the Stone Poneys.
One of the most famous and most-often quoted passages in Walden, of course, is this one from paragraph 10 of “Conclusion”:
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Walden made the two-word phrase “different drummer” a common expression in English. But not right away. We can trace the rise of this word-pair (a “two-gram,” in data-speak) using Google’s Ngram Viewer, which shows us that in books written in English, the phrase begins to take off in the 1940’s and rises steeply in frequency between 1960 and 1980.
It was in the early 1940’s that interest in Thoreau really began to grow, an interest both reflected in and fueled by the scholars and enthusiasts who founded The Thoreau Society in 1941, led by Walter Harding, who in 1956 joined the English department at SUNY Geneseo. (An earlier, smaller uptick in the appearance of “different drummer” may have had something to do with the fact that, as Harding himself has written, Thoreau’s message of simplicity resonated with life during the Great Depression. See “Thoreau’s Reputation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Joel Myerson, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p.8.) The big spike that starts in the early 60’s correlates with the rise of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement as well as a youth culture that prized self-discovery, self-actualization, and a broad rejection of commercial values.
In 1962, the bicentennial year of Thoreau’s death, 24 year-old William Melvin Kelley published his first novel, A Different Drummer. As Kathryn Schulz has written in a recent profile of Kelley for The New Yorker magazine, the novel
promptly earned him comparisons to an impressive range of literary greats, from William Faulkner to Isaac Bashevis Singer to James Baldwin. It also got him talked about, together with the likes of Alvin Ailey and James Earl Jones, as among the most talented African-American artists of his generation.
Kelley’s novel opens “in a mythical state bounded by Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and the Gulf of Mexico,” according to a review published in the Chicago Tribune on June 10, 1962. One of the state’s inhabitants, Tucker Caliban, “decides to listen to what Thoreau, in his ‘Walden,’ called a ‘different drummer,’ to heed the voice of his conscience and refuse to participate in a society based upon inequality.”
The review, written by SUNY Geneseo professor of English Walter Harding and published under the headline “A Rare First Novel: Dynamic, Imaginative, and Accomplished,” continues:
[Caliban] destroys his farm land with salt, burns his home, shoots his animals, and departs for a new life in the north. His action sparks a mass reaction by all the other Negroes in the state, who overnight abandontheir homes and join him on the trek northward.
As his epigraph, Kelley used two quotations from Thoreau’s Walden.
Kelley appreciated Harding’s enthusiastic review of his novel (Harding called it “gripping from the first page to the last”), and the two began a correspondence that eventually led to Kelley’s spending a semester — spring 1965 — as a visiting professor of English at Geneseo.
We might consider one final connection between Kelley and Thoreau. Schulz claims that Kelley is credited with the first printed use of the colloquialism woke as a synonym for a certain kind of self- and social awareness. The word appears in the title of Kelley’s May 20, 1962 op-ed in the New York Times on “Negro idiom” (linguists today call it “African American Vernacular English”): “If You’re Woke You Dig It.”
One can’t help but be reminded of how pervasively Thoreau himself uses the contrast between sleep and waking as a metaphor for awareness in Walden. The kind of awareness he has in mind varies depending on the context. Several different (if related) types of awareness are offered in rapid succession in paragraph 14 of “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”: “intellectual exertion,” a “poetic or divine life,” attentiveness to Nature. But in the context of the meaning that woke has assumed in our present moment, one kind stands out. “Moral reform,” Thoreau writes in this paragraph, “is the effort to throw off sleep.”
It’s not hard to see why, for the epigraph to his own book, Thoreau plucked a sentence from paragraph 7 of “Where I Lived”: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.
Tuesday Theme – Solitude
Today’s theme song for ENGL 203-04 is “Solitude,” composed by Duke Ellington and first performed by him in 1934. The lyrics were written by Eddie DeLange and Irving Mills. Billie Holiday recorded her version in 1952.
Needless to say, the mood of yearning and despair here is quite different from that of the “Solitude” chapter in Walden. “I come and go with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself,” writes Thoreau. He seems to revel in his solitude — “I love to be alone,” he tells us — though he can do so in part because he isn’t really alone. He’s inseparable from all that surrounds him. It’s not just that he has “the friendship of the seasons” and human visitors who leave traces of themselves after visiting his house in his absence; he also feels himself to be deeply enmeshed in Nature — “a part of herself.” His liberty when alone is a liberty in Nature, the liberty of one whose identity isn’t defined solely by what lies within. “Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?”
As a bonus track offered with no pretense of a connection to Thoreau, here are Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong performing another song to which Eddie DeLange penned the words, the memorable “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans,” written for the 1947 film New Orleans.
https://youtu.be/Xhkxy3ei8os
Thursday Theme – Spanish Pipedream
Today’s theme song in ENGL 203-04 is John Prine’s “Spanish Pipedream.”
It’s the refrain, of course, that connects with our examination of Thoreau’s Walden:
Blow up your TV,
Throw away your paper,
Go to the country,
Build you a home.
Plant a little garden,
Eat a lot o’ peaches,
Try to find Jesus,
On your own.
Granted, neither TV’s nor peaches put in an appearance in Walden, and Jesus merits just a single passing reference; but we do get the railroad, the paper (in “Where I Lived” paragraphs 18 and 19), beans, and something like a personal search for God (“God himself culminates in the present moment …”).
More broadly, we get the idea that the good life is to be found in giving up “worldly things” (material wealth, fashion, gossip) in favor of a simple existence in harmony with Nature.
All of this is to say that one way to read Walden is as a member of the general literary category known as pastoral. Whether we call pastoral a “type,” “genre,” “convention,” or “mode” the point is that to invoke this term in an effort to understand Walden is to identify Thoreau’s work as a particular kind of thing; that is, to give it a certain identity.
But texts don’t have singular identities any more than people do. In our discussion of Walden, we’ve already seen that we can also identify it, in whole or in part, as a particular instance of several other types: social criticism (a category that arguably includes the words of Hebrew prophets like Amos as well as those of ancient figures like Socrates and Diogenes); the sermon; the useful lecture; the travel narrative; and, of course, autobiography. We could undoubtedly expand this list.
If texts can be identified in so many different ways, one might be forgiven for wondering if there’s any point in trying to pin them down with an identity at all. Aren’t we just forcing the amorphous stuff of human creativity into silly boxes?
Yet we can’t avoid the move to identify, for at least two reasons. First, in trying to understand a text, the first question we’re bound to ask ourselves is “What kind of thing is this?” The second is that writers themselves, like all creators, always begin from what has been created before them. They learn to write books by reading books. In building on the creative work of the past, they inevitably carry forward one or more traditions, whether they see themselves as doing so (and they frequently do) or not.
Identifying a work as this or that kind of work only gets us into trouble when we assume that the work has only one identity, and when we fail to recognize that identifying it as an instance of this reveals some of its characteristics (while obscuring others), and identifying it as an instance of that both reveals and obscures others. We only begin to get a full picture when we can see it as simultaneously this, that, and perhaps some number of other things as well.
Tuesday theme – Henry David Thoreau
Today’s theme for ENGL 203-04 is Paul Geremia’s “Henry David Thoreau,” a song about the man who, in his time, was the swingin-est transcendentalatin’ cat alive.
Yes and no
Graff and Birkenstein, p. 63:
“Yes and no.” “Yes, but . . .” “Although I agree up to a point, I still insist . . .” These are just some of the ways you can make your argument complicated and nuanced while maintaining a clear, reader-friendly framework. The parallel structure — “yes and no”; “on the one hand I agree, on the other I disagree” — enables readers to place your argument on that map of positions we spoke of earlier in this chapter while still keeping your argument sufficiently complex.
Compare Martina Navratilova on Serena Williams in today’s New York Times:
Serena Williams has part of it right. There is a huge double standard for women when it comes to how bad behavior is punished — and not just in tennis.
But in her protests against an umpire during the United States Open final on Saturday, she also got part of it wrong.
Read the full article, a model of the approach that Graff and Birkenstein call “Agree and Disagree Simultaneously,” which they also call “our favorite way of responding” (62) to what “they say.”
More meta moves that matter
Last week in “Fluid Readers, Fluid Texts,” we looked at Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. If’s worth noting that in their effort to offer practical guidance on good academic writing, Graff and Birkenstein quickly and naturally make the shift we’ve described in previous discussions as moving “up one level of abstraction.” There’s simply no way they can argue for the value of their practical advice without getting theoretical, without getting “meta.” They don’t call attention to this move, but it’s there all the same. In the first paragraph of their introduction, they describe writing as a particular kind of activity – an activity, like playing the piano, shooting a basketball, or driving a car – that is learned and that can be broken down into a sequence of “moves.” Not all human activities are of this type.
Behind that first paragraph, then, lies the theoretical question “What is academic writing?” – a question to which the answer is no more obvious than the answer to the question, “What is a text?”
Graff and Birkenstein go further: the move-based activity that writing most closely resembles – perhaps is simply a form of – is conversation. To categorize writing this way is to imply answers to some related theoretical questions: What’s the purpose of academic writing? How, exactly, does it work? By what standards can we distinguish effective from ineffective writing?
We can think of Graff and Birkenstein the theorists as looking for a way to represent the activity of writing, as trying to build a model of it. These are useful words in general for thinking about what the activity of theorizing is. (And to choose them is, of course, to theorize about theory. There’s no end to how meta we can get!)
We spent the last part of class looking at the Lindsay Ellis video on film studies that Taylor posted. We saw that Lindsay Ellis’s argument seems to make many of the “moves” Graff and Birkenstein describe – that her argument fits their model of argumentation quite well. We also saw that to make her argument, she, too had to move up one level of abstraction; she, too, had to theorize. Her main theoretical question – What makes a bit of culture (whether a poem or an action movie) worth examining closely? – is one of the most important ones we can ask as practitioners of criticism.
Lindsay Ellis’ Transformers Theory
Once known under the internet pseudonym ‘The Nostalgia Chick’, Lindsay Ellis was hired by the website Channel Awesome in 2009 as a distaff counterpart to their most popular series, ‘The Nostalgia Critic’. Much as her predecessor did, Ellis originally focused on media from the 1980s and 1990s (in her case, media targeted at girls). But after breaking from Channel Awesome in 2013, Ellis began to produce independent content on YouTube that was more focused on academic analysis of media rather than the punchy, entertaining reviews she did under the ‘Chick’ persona. These include Loose Canon, (a series of video essays on different iterations of stock characters throughout media), An Unexpected Autopsy (a three-part series in which she examines the troubled production history and flaws of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films), and… The Whole Plate.
The Whole Plate is an ongoing series that attempts to use the Transformers series to introduce academic theory concepts. It’s one of those things that sounds crazy on paper, but in practice works surprisingly well in making lofty concepts of theory easy to understand for the average viewer. And it turns out, you can use Transformers to examine pretty much anything!
Feminist theory (where are all the lady robots?), queer theory (homoerotic friendships are apparently a huge thing in Michael Bay movies — who knew?), the idea of authorial intent, and Death of the Author (we don’t know very much about Michael Bay’s opinions, so can we use his movies to intuit them?), and even Marxist theory (can the Transformers franchise be considered art if the reason it exists was originally to sell toys?)!
I recommend this series to anybody who has trouble grasping theory concepts or applying them to texts. Ellis focuses on film theory, as that’s what her specialty is, but her points could apply to any text that is examined in this class. She uses language that’s easy to understand and accessible, and uses humor in order to get her points across. More to the point, her style is refreshing in that the whole point of the series is to make lofty theory concepts accessable to the average viewer, but doesn’t talk down to her audience at any point.
Here’s a link to the first video in the series!
If you have time after watching The Whole Plate, I would definitely recommend her other videos! She has interesting perspectives, and her sense of humor is infectious.