Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Our Things: Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives

Our Things: Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives ARTICLES Our Things Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives br anka ar sić Distantly related things are strangely near. —Thoreau, Journal, May 23, 1851 Thoreau is as much obsessed with things as he is with oak trees. Things play a central role everywhere in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Most obviously, the Thoreau brothers make a boat and then turn it into a central character of the narra- tive, so that the boat, which is supposed to transport them leisurely from the Concord’s stream of death into the Merrimack’s waters of life, is elevated into a sort of amphibious ontological phenom- enon. Promoted as both capable of fl ying like a bird and drifting on water like a fi sh, it is a creature capable of drifting fl ights, which Thoreau imagines as an excellent mode of existence. But there are other objects also: arrowheads just under the surface of the earth, churches spoiling the beauty of a Sunday landscape, houses, monu- ments indiscernible among the stones, and cemeteries grown into moss. In A Week, material culture is always immersed within ani- mated processes, history turning into forests, archaeology into ge- ology, objects into creatures. Similarly http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences University of Nebraska Press

Our Things: Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives

Download PDF
25 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-nebraska-press/our-things-thoreau-on-objects-relics-and-archives-ai0Xi3Wq3T
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
ISSN
1938-8020

Abstract

ARTICLES Our Things Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives br anka ar sić Distantly related things are strangely near. —Thoreau, Journal, May 23, 1851 Thoreau is as much obsessed with things as he is with oak trees. Things play a central role everywhere in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Most obviously, the Thoreau brothers make a boat and then turn it into a central character of the narra- tive, so that the boat, which is supposed to transport them leisurely from the Concord’s stream of death into the Merrimack’s waters of life, is elevated into a sort of amphibious ontological phenom- enon. Promoted as both capable of fl ying like a bird and drifting on water like a fi sh, it is a creature capable of drifting fl ights, which Thoreau imagines as an excellent mode of existence. But there are other objects also: arrowheads just under the surface of the earth, churches spoiling the beauty of a Sunday landscape, houses, monu- ments indiscernible among the stones, and cemeteries grown into moss. In A Week, material culture is always immersed within ani- mated processes, history turning into forests, archaeology into ge- ology, objects into creatures. Similarly

Journal

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences – University of Nebraska Press

Published: Oct 9, 2014

There are no references for this article.