"Experiencing and Knowing Thoreau: Aesthetics and Style"
Hey there.
It's Professor Bernstein, and in this video, I want to guide us more fully into an exploration
of what it means to experience and know Thoreau and in order to do this, I'm going to introduce
to some basic ideas about aesthetics and style.
If you're in my Thoreau class, you'll recall that we started the semester by raising questions
about what it means to know Thoreau and what it means to know an author in general.
And I called attention to the course catalogue's description of how Major Authors classes are
supposed to "provide students with an intensive study of the work of a major author" and teach
them about the "cultural and historical context from which" the writer's "work emerges."
Students are "expected" to be able to "demonstrate their mastery" of this material.
Knowing important points and issues in a writer's work. . .and knowing about the cultural and
historical context within which it emerges—those are all good things.
But something's missing here—something very important.
You!
This approach to knowing an author leaves you out of it—on a significant level.
You're just absorbing and demonstrating that you've absorbed these things.
But you're experience of the author's writing—your felt response to it?
It's left out of the picture.
Lindsay Waters, the executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, explains
that this is a serious problem within literary studies.
He argues that "literary scholarship has become disconnected from life" and declares that
"something else even more suspicious has happened to professional criticism in America over
the past 30 years, and that is its love affair with reducing literature to ideas," which
is not "at all the same thing as art."
Waters explains that "literary criticism no longer aims to appreciate aesthetics — to
study how human beings respond to art.
Do you get dizzy when you look at a Turner painting of a storm at sea?
Do certain buildings make you feel insignificant while others make you feel just the right
size?
Without understanding that intensely physical reaction, scholarship about the arts can no
longer enlarge the soul."
So let's just consider this for a few moments.
First of all, Waters provides a really simple but useful definition of aesthetics—it's
the study of how we respond—physically, sensuously—to art.
He's also touching on something else that's very important.
. .this "physical reaction" to art is what connects art to our lives—it's what
has the capacity to "enlarge the soul."
What do you make of what Water is saying in relation to what we've been discussing so
far this semester in relation to Thoreau, Romanticism, and Transcendentalism?
How does taking our physical, sense-oriented response to literature help us more fully
know Thoreau?
How can it enlarge our souls?
What does it even mean to study our physical reaction to art?
Has this way of approaching literature ever factored into any of your college classes?
I know this approach might be new to some of you, so let me give you an example that
Waters shares and one example from my own experience studying philosophy.
Waters says that "a criticism devoted to aesthetics might take a novel like Theodore Dreiser's
Sister Carrie and note how its main character, Caroline Meeber, again and again finds herself
in front of sheets of glass — store windows, mirrors — that seem to beckon her in.
The question would not be whether her vanity or love of material objects is good or bad;
it would be how Dreiser invites all of us to fall through the glass with Carrie, to
become a part of the story and experience ourselves as vain and frail and ambitious."
So we'd be experiencing for ourselves what Carrie's experiencing
as she's beckoned in by all these sheets of glass—and we'd be experiencing this through
the author's language and style—and our felt responses to it.
Let me give you this other example.
We talked about how Thoreau can irritate us.
Well, there one sentence—a 224-word sentence—at the very beginning of Jonathan Edwards' essay
on "Being."
Edwards was an 18th-century American philosopher and theologian.
This sentence was so painful for me to read—it was so ugly and unpleasant—that I actually
threw the book across the room when I first tried to read it.
Now, I could have just dismissed this essay based on my frustration, but instead, I decided
to really probe why the sentence made me feel this way and how it was intimately connected
to the argument Edwards was trying to make.
And this contemplation eventually led to a 40-page essay that
I wrote—which focuses on this sentence and Edwards' thought experiments and how he used
the style of his writing to get his readers engaged in his ideas.
So when you're reading Thoreau I want you to think about how his words, sentences, paragraphs,
and chapters make you feel.
You might even want to consider what you notice about the pacing of Walden.
Is it fast?
Is it slow?
How does the pacing make you feel?
Why does it make you feel this way?
How is it connected to the larger issues in the text?
See what happens.
We'll be continuing to
explore our aesthetic reactions to Thoreau as we study Walden and his journal.
So that's it for now.