Above time : Emerson's and Thoreau's temporal revolutions

The Resource Above time : Emerson's and Thoreau's temporal revolutions
Label
Above time : Emerson's and Thoreau's temporal revolutions
Title remainder
Emerson's and Thoreau's temporal revolutions
Statement of responsibility
James R. Guthrie
Creator
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
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 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
Member of
Action
digitized
Cataloging source
N$T
Dewey number
810.9/384
Government publication
government publication of a state province territory dependency etc
Index
index present
Language note
English
LC call number
PS1642.T5
LC item number
G88 2001eb
Literary form
non fiction
Nature of contents
  • dictionaries
  • bibliography
Structured data from the Bibframe namespace is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Missouri University of Science & Technology Library. Additional terms may apply to data associated with third party namespaces.
Processing Feedback ...