Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LIFE's editors were never content with mere news. Early in the magazine's history, Alfred Eisenstaedt helped establish a new art form: the photo essay. Those essays are now acknowledged as masterpieces of their genre: W. Eugene Smith's study of life and death in a Spanish village, Gordon Parks' unflinching closeups of a slum family in Rio de Janeiro, Leonard McCombe's portrait of the career girl...
Cavell follows the lead of Charles Anderson, who proposed in 1969 that Walden, always a difficult book to assign a genre be taken out of the usual categories of prose essay or autobiography and considered as a united heroic poem. Cavell carries the redefinition a step further he examines Walden as scripture, a holy book with a philosophical doctrine and a prophetic meaning with hymns and parables, epics and parables, epics and a comprehensible symbolic unity. With a swipe he disposes of such essentially irrelevant questions as the importance of Thoreau's mysterious journals or the divergences of Thoreau...
...most original insight in Cavell's essay is his identification of the central philosophical question in Walden the problem of free will and determinism. Men determine themselves through the mythologies they create whether the mystery of predestination or demigod at technology mystery of predestination or the damaged of technology. Thoreau says, He proceeds from there to create a mythic life this own at Walden Ponds which has written call to his neighbors, and to us, to awaken and shed the necessities we have brought upon ourselves Thoreau clearly realizes that the casting off and rebuilding of one's own life...
CAVELL STRUCTURES FOR ESSAY around his lesson in reading. His first chapter, "Words deals with the most fundamental aspects of approaching its Walden's meanings, its epic and religious conventions and the intensity of its expression. The second part, "Sentences," explores the way in which Thoreau's words work together to lead in into predictive conjecture. Their call to action challenges even our right passively to read them. "Portions," the third and final chapter, carries the reader from ". . . more or less formal question about the kind of book Walden is to matters more or less concerning its doctrine," that...
CAVELL ATTEMPTS A GREAT DEAL in a rather slim volume, somewhere between a long, critical essay (he leaves many unanswered questions) and a compact, definitive thesis (he answers more questions that we ought to expect.) He has discovered an authentic American philosopher in the literary tradition right under our noses and he tries to show us how to approach Thoreau and his work, though it is written in a "language dead to degenerate times." He tries to shake our belief that we no longer need a book to tell our lost nation how to live. Cavell can be thoroughly confusing...