Monday

Today we are going to read chapter 4, but first let's think about the following: 

 

1.) Does Walden appeal to our "sense of rebelliousness and individualism"? Are we "inspired by his idealistic actions and principled and good-humored erudition"? Do we enjoy thinking about how we might take a more "Thoreauvian approach" to our own lives?

2.) How do modern conveniences and gadgets influence our culture? After reading Thoreau, are we now eager to give them up?

3.) Can we consider how doing and thinking for ourselves is made possible (or impeded) by modern educational and cultural institutions?

4.) To which "genre" (or genres) does Walden belong?

5.) What is Thoreau's relationship to his audience and to society as a whole? How does he situate his narrative persona? That is, what kind of person is the "I" in the text, and how do we know?

6.) How can Walden be considered as an application of Transcendental philosophy?

 

We need to start to discuss some examples of rhetorical devices in Walden.

Anaphora  -
“We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.” (Winston Churchill)

Apart from the function of giving prominence to certain ideas, the use of anaphora in literature adds rhythm, thus making it more pleasurable to read, and easier to remember. As a literary device, anaphora serves the purpose of giving artistic effect to passages of prose and poetry.
As a rhetorical device, anaphora is used to appeal to the emotions of the audience, in order to persuade, inspire, motivate, and encourage them.

ANTITHESIS: (from literarydevices.net)

Antithesis, literal meaning opposite, is a rhetorical device in which two opposite ideas are put together in a sentence to achieve a contrasting effect.

Antithesis emphasizes the idea of contrast by parallel structures of the contrasted phrases or clauses, i.e. the structures of phrases and clauses are similar in order to draw the attention of the listeners or readers. For example:

“Setting foot on the moon may be a small step for a man but a giant step for mankind.”

The use of contrasting ideas, “a small step” and “a giant step”, in the sentence above emphasizes the significance of one of the biggest landmarks of human history.

OTHER EXAMPLES:

 Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

• Man proposes, God disposes.
• Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing.
• Speech is silver, but silence is gold.
• Patience is bitter, but it has a sweet fruit.
• Money is the root of all evils: poverty is the fruit of all goodness.
• You are easy on the eyes, but hard on the heart.

 Allusion (everywhere).

parallelism
parables, aphorisms, symbols, diction and syntax.

CHAPTER 2 - "Where I Lived and What For"

He goes to Walden Pond because he wishes to live deliberately, to slow down the fast pace of modern life and actually enjoy it.  He claims that you can't learn anything from newspapers about live ("The Revolution will not be Televised")

Quotes:
"As long as possible live free and uncommitted.  It makes little difference whether you are committed to a farm or a county jail."

"Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.  Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.  Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering?"

"The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life."

"I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.  How could I have looked him in the face?"

"Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity."

"We do not ride on the railroads; it rides upon us."

"Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?"

"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip."

"Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature."

"I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."

Chapter 3 READING

Reading literature is the closest thing to living.

Reading great books requires training such training as athletes undergo.

Nothing truly can be translated.

"Most men have learned to read to serve paltry convenience, as they learned to ciper in order to keep accounts... but reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a higher sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury .. but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to."

"The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers."

"I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannont read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects."

"We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment."

Chapter 4 SOUNDS 

This is a strange, but poetic chapter that focuses on the sounds that Thoreau hears when living at Walden (and how the sounds make him feel).  There is this idea of Thoreau's that most of humanity doesn't quite listen to its soundings.  To be in-tune with the place you live is - in part - to listen closely to it, to hear it, and perhaps to respond to what you hear.