Cookie Consent by FreePrivacyPolicy.com
JAAAS logo

Articles

Vol. 1 No. 2 (2020): Soundscapes, Sonic Cultures, and American Studies

'Language ... Without Metaphor': Soundscapes and Worldly Engagements in Henry David Thoreau's Walden

Submitted
February 4, 2021
Published
2020-06-30

Abstract

Henry David Thoreau has been celebrated for his observation of the natural world. While noting Thoreau's skills of observation in relation to the natural world and his responsiveness to sensory experience, scholars have, however, tended to privilege sight over sound. Even though Thoreau was recognized by musicians such as Charles Ives and John Cage for having an exceptionally fine ear for the symphonies of nature, sound still remains a neglected aspect of Thoreau's Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. This article is a corrective to this status quo, as it reads Walden as a transmedial project in which Thoreau frequently tuned in to the sounds encountered during his sojourn in nature in order to figure the essential parameters of his experiment and to relate to the entire world of experience. The complex soundscape of Walden engenders a multifaceted awareness of modern space, as sounds of nature, sounds of progress, and the clamor of people intersect. Accordingly, this article explores how Thoreau uses a vast array of sounds to relate to the world; how he apprehended, and even appreciated, not only the harmonies of nature, but also dissonance—within nature, as well as between nature, modernity and rurality. In doing so, this article proposes a reading of Thoreau's auditory experience as a reflection on, and negotiation with, a multifaceted world where the pastoral and the industrial coexist.

References

  1. Bellis, Peter J. Writing Revolution: Aesthetics and Politics in Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003.
  2. Bock, Jannika. Concord in Massachusetts, Discord in the World: The Writings of Henry Thoreau and John Cage. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008.
  3. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1995.
  4. Cage, John. Empty Words. Writings '73–'78. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.
  5. Case, Kristen. American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011.
  6. Chion, Michel. "The Three Listening Modes." In The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne, 48-53. London: Routledge, 2012.
  7. Claviez, Thomas. "Pragmatism, Critical Theory, and the Search for Ecological Genealogies in American Culture." In Pragmatism and Literary Studies, edited by Winfried Fluck, 343-80. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999.
  8. Corbin, Alain. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside. Translated by Martin Thom. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
  9. Feder, Stuart. "Charles Ives and Henry David Thoreau: 'A Transcendental Tune of Concord.'" In Ives Studies, edited by Philip Lambert, 163-76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  10. Gatta, John. Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  11. Gura, Philip. "Nature Writing." In The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, edited by Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis and Laura Dassow Walls, 408-25. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
  12. Ives, Charles. Piano Sonata no. 2: "Concord" with the Essays before a Sonata, introduction by Stephen Drury. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012.
  13. James, Henry. Henry James Letters, vol. 4. Edited by Leon Edel. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984.
  14. Johnson, Phylis. Second Life, Media, and the Other Society. New York: Peter Lang, 2010.
  15. Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
  16. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
  17. Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.
  18. McBride, Lee A. III. "Insurrectionist Ethics and Thoreau." Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49, no. 1 (2013): 29-45. https://doi.org/10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.49.1.29.
  19. Piekut, Benjamin. "Chance and Certainty: John Cage's Politics of Nature." Cultural Critique 84 (2013): 134–63.
  20. Pinch, Trevor and Karin Bijsterveld, "Introduction. New Keys to the World of Sound." In The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, 3-35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
  21. Porte, Joel. Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965.
  22. Raymond, David B. "The Importance of Work: Henry David Thoreau and the American Work Ethic." The Concord Saunterer, New Series 17 (2009): 137-56.
  23. Retallack, Joan. "Poethics of a Complex Realism." In John Cage: Composed in America, edited by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman, 242-73. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
  24. Robinson, David. Natural Life: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
  25. Schafer, Murray R. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. 2nd ed. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994.
  26. Schweighauser, Philipp. The Noises of American Literature, 1890-1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.
  27. Shamir, Milette. Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
  28. Shultis, Christopher. Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1998.
  29. Smith, Mark. "The Garden in the Machine: Listening to Early American Industrialization." In The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, 39-57. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
  30. Sterne, Jonathan. "Sonic Imaginations." In The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne, 1-17. London: Routledge, 2012.
  31. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
  32. Thompson, Emily Ann. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
  33. Titon, Jeff Todd. "The Music Culture as a World of Music." In Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples, 3rd ed., edited by Jeff Titon et al., 1-32. Belmont, CA: Schirmer, 2009.
  34. Titon, Jeff Todd. "Thoreau's Ear." Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1, no. 1 (2015): 144-54.
  35. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. New York: Library of America, 1985..
  36. West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Similar Articles

1-10 of 110

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.