Fw: Re: Surveyors in American Romance (The Custom House of Hawthorne)

[Dave Williams]

--- On Sat, 9/4/10, Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: Surveyors in American Romance (The Custom House of Hawthorne)
> To: "Dave Williams" <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com>
> Date: Saturday, September 4, 2010, 1:32 AM
> Henry David Thoreau, one of
> America’s most prominent environmental writers, supported
> himself as a land surveyor for much of his life, parceling
> land that would be sold off to loggers. In the only study of
> its kind, Patrick Chura analyzes this seeming contradiction
> to show how the best surveyor in Concord combined civil
> engineering with civil disobedience.
>     
> 
> Placing Thoreau's surveying in historical context, Thoreau
> the Land Surveyor explains the cultural and ideological
> implications of surveying work in the mid-nineteenth
> century. Chura explains the ways that Thoreau's
> environmentalist disposition and philosophical convictions
> asserted themselves even as he reduced the land to
> measurable terms and acted as an agent for bringing it under
> proprietary control. He also describes in detail Thoreau's
> 1846 survey of Walden Pond. By identifying the origins of
> Walden in--of all places--surveying data, Chura re-creates a
> previously lost supporting manuscript of this American
> classic.
> 
> http://www.upf.com/book.asp?id=CHURA001
> 
> --- On Sat, 9/4/10, Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > From: Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com>
> > Subject: Surveyors in American Romance (The Custom
> House of Hawthorne)
> > To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> > Date: Saturday, September 4, 2010, 1:28 AM
> > 
> > 
> > Hawthorne also played with established conventions. In
> "The
> > Custom-House," the preface to The Scarlet Letter
> (1850), the
> > relation of the actual to the imaginary is taken
> under
> > consideration in a characteristically Romantic manner:
> as
> > both form and content. Although prefaces usually
> function as
> > part of the proscenium or narrative frame, setting off
> what
> > follows as "just pretend," it is quickly apparent
> that
> > Hawthorne's preface is a fiction all its own.
> Specifically,
> > it is the story of how Hawthorne came to write the
> tale of
> > Hester Prynne and her scarlet letter, but by the end
> the
> > narrator of the preface has been transformed from
> Nathaniel
> > Hawthorne, real-life custom surveyor victimized by
> his
> > political enemies, to a purely fictive and highly
> creative
> > imaginative voice. Instead of providing a factual
> ground for
> > the fiction which follows, the facts of the sketch
> > themselves thus become fictions, allowing Hawthorne
> to
> > explore one of the fundamental components
> >  of the literary transaction: the relationships
> among
> > authors and readers, fact and fiction. The preface
> makes
> > clear that for Hawthorne, romance involves
> experimentation,
> > play, metafictional allusion, and narrative
> gamesmanship.
> > 
> > http://www.enotes.com/american-history-literature/romance
> > 
> > 
> > 
> >       
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
> 
>