Concord

This paper attempts to read the novel Surfacing, written by the Booker Prize winning Canadian author, poet, critic and environmental activist Margaret Atwood, through the lens of ecocriticism. Atwood has delved not only into the changing ecological Canadian scenario as an aftereffect of what she calls ‘Americanisation’, but through her protagonist and her journey of self-exploration, Atwood portrays nature as the elemental force that makes a man realise the essence of humanity, and only in…

Mohandas K. Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. express their respect for Henry David Thoreau in an except of their writing from “Passive Resisters” and “A Centenary Gathering for Henry David Thoreau.” In their writings, there is also a relevance towards transcendentalism. Transcendentalism is a philosophy that our knowledge of reality is based on our own understanding rather than scientific evidence. Thoreau was a transcendentalist himself. Thoreau and his ideology influenced Gandhi and King…

Do you know anything about Transcendentalism? In class we've been learning about Transcendentalism by reading short stories from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Transcendentalism is an idealistic philosophical and social movement that developed in New England around 1836 in reaction to rationalism. Some people believe that Americans or people in general do not appreciate and connect to nature today. They say that, because people nowadays like to stay inside and play video games or…

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are two of the most influential transcendentalist writers of their time. Both men rejected the idea that knowledge could be fully disocvered through sheer experience and observation and asserted that some information can only be discovered through extrasensory perceptions such as intuition or spirituality. While both shared the core beliefs of transcendentalism, each man chose to discover their path to disocover the inner self through different…

Walden: a Journey Into the Mind of a Transcendentalist A new epoch is on the rise. Transcendentalist thinking built its core belief very strongly around that idea. In a nutshell, transcendentalist thinking hinged upon the way one saw the world around them and consequently formed their beliefs about it. This ideology called for individuals to worry less about what the world around them believed, but rather, to turn to their own imagination. Instead of motivating one’s actions based on the…

Transcendentalism is a movement created in the nineteenth century, influenced by romanticism, that mainly focuses on the idea of individuality and the connection between man, the universe, and nature. It was started by Ralph Waldo Emerson, an author and essayist, who lived in the 1800s. Three ideas that are important to this movement are imagination, insight, and inspiration. According to transcendentalists, these are all gifts from God and are to be regarded highly. Art, poetry, literature, and…

Being “weird” is an age-old concept, and one that is often greeted with fear. The thought of being “weird” is scary. If someone is weird, they are odd; they don’t fit in. I personally have been called weird numerous times in my life, an experience which has proven helpful. Occasionally, it prompted change in my life, and other times I simply ignored it and moved on. The concept of being “normal” oftentimes represents conforming to the accepted values of society and disregarding your own. Both…

The simplest form in the world is illustrated as black and white, and while I often get caught in the gray my confabulation with Henry David Thoreau that day drowned me in the idea of the value of simplicity and its exceptional greatness. It was a shallow afternoon and the sun was hanging deeply in the sky, and because of my blissful ignorance, I wandered off into a place where peacefulness was a foundation of life. Walden Pond was the name, and a generous breeze devoured my body as night fell.…

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a smart man. He's said a lot of things one can't help but to agree with and he words things beautifully. One of the things he wants to get across to his audience that really, really needs to be done more often in literature: his nonconformist views. I've never read anything I agree with more on this planet than his essay Self-Reliance. To say he want's to spread his nonconformist ideals is to sum up everything in the whole passage. To trust your instinct is to refuse to…

All literature figures play a key role to shape the history of the world; within American literature, authors and poets alike create unique stories of fiction and non-fiction novels. Some are easy to read but others will take time to understand, depending on the level of reading that the reader carries. American literature within history should be cherished to everyone to instill the spirit and tradition passing to the next generation. “The Masque of the Red Death” was written by one of the…