October 22 and 23

Book Report due November 5
Walden poster due November 12
 Walden: Read pages 1-64, Conclusion and 10 pages of your choosing. 

Nature Walk--Study Transcendentalism under a tree, the way Thoreau would have us do.

Assignment (Homework): 
1. Go into nature and find a natural object that means something to you. Try to think in terms of metaphor and how that object might represent life or perhaps even an aspect of the human drama. This is what Thoreau and other Transcendentalist writers do (it's what poets and authors in general do--they are observers of life).
2. Write 1/2-1 page (no more, please) telling us the significance of that object. If you'd rather, write a poem. (10 points).
Homework assignment #2. Read the autumn poems found here: Autumn Poems
Walden reading schedule:
By Thur, 10/24 read to page 24
By Monday, 10/28, read to page 53
Remember, as you read, copy down quotes from the book and include page numbers.
25 quotes in all due November 4

Discuss Walden
(4) "What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates his fate"
      "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"
(5) "Age in no better,  hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as you, for it has not profited so much as it has lost"
(6) "If I repent of anythng, it is very likely to be my good behavior"
(8)  "Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind"
(14) "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes"




If you haven't already done so, read at least the following parts of Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality: stanzas 1-4; 9-11. I'll be honest, this is really tough reading, but you should be able to get the main idea (nature is beautiful and inspiring, and although we sometimes go through hard times and become disillusioned, Nature, the great teacher, will show us that life "is beautiful yet" and she will give us healing "thoughts do often lie too deep for tears.")

British Romantics
    William Wordsworth
         "The Tables Turned"
         Ode: Intimations of Immortality

Romanticism in America
Dark Romantics
    Hawthorne
        Young Goodman Brown
    Poe
Transcendentalists
   Emerson
   Thoreau