Synopses & Reviews
In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved from his parents' house in Concord, Massachusetts, to a one-room cabin on land owned by his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. After 26 months he transformed his stay in the woods into one of the most famous events in American history. In Walden x 40, adopting Thoreau's own compositional method, Robert B. Ray takes up several questions posed in Walden. Thoreau developed his books from his lectures, and his lectures from his almost-daily journal notations of the world around him, with its fluctuating weather and appointed seasons, both forever familiar and suddenly brand new. Ray derives his 40 brief essays from the details of Walden itself, reading the book in the way that Thoreau proposed to explore his own life--deliberately. Ray demonstrates that however accustomed we have grown to its lessons, Walden continues to be as surprising as the November snowfall that, Thoreau reports, "covered the ground... and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter."
Review
"[Ray] opens conversation with the reader.... This is a book which beginner and expert will enjoy alike." --Daniel Herwitz, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan Indiana University Press
Review
"The essays often return to the same quotations and ideas, illuminating Walden's darker, more obscure passages from various philosophical and theoretical perspectives--thought experiments that read like a thick layering of superimposed snapshots that Ray has taken from different angles of Walden's pages.... Ray's collection of readings never resolve themselves into a single argument, always teetering on the brink of explanation. Yet its evasive technique may be Walden x 40's greatest charm, pointing the reader back to Walden itself so that she might engage in her own interrogations." --Times Literary Supplement Indiana University Press
About the Author
Robert B. Ray is Professor of English at the University of Florida. He is author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980; The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy; How a Film Theory Got Lost (IUP, 2001); and The ABCs of Classic Hollywood.
Table of Contents
Bibliographical Note
Introduction
1. Adventure
2. Ants
3. Awake
4. Baskets
5. Books
6. Colors
7. Death
8. Distance
9. Drummer
10. Experiment
11. Fashion
12. Flute
13. Full of Hope
14. Genius
15. Good and Evil
16. Higher Laws
17. Idleness
18. July 4, 1845
19. Kittlybenders
20. Leaving Walden
21. Moulting
22. Name
23. Numbers
24. Obscurity
25. Opportunity
26. Philosopher
27. Proving
28. Question
29. Readers
30. Rents
31. Ruins
32. Spider
33. Stripped
34. Tracks and paths
35. Unexplorable
36. Vocation
37. Without bounds
38. X marks Walden's depth
39. Years
40. Zanzibar
Notes
Annotated Bibliography
Index