/lit/ - Literature

>>12787160
Of course it is. Yes.

>>12787160
Yes. It actually is pretty incredible the foresight Thoreau demonstrates in anticipating cultural trends and the influence of technology. There's a passage where he reflects upon the invention and spread of the Telegram which has stuck with me.

>"“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

Transcendentalism is the redpill anon.

>>12787160
Moby Dick is better

>>12787232
How are Moby Dick and Walden even comparable?

>>12787253
They are both Transcendentalist literature, unless of course you either 1. Never read Moby Dick or 2. Didn't understand shit about it

>>12787253
>>12787263
I also wrote a 20 page essay last year in Uni comparing Moby Dick and Paradise Lost (Ahab and Lucifer mostly). Trust me it is transcendentalist lit.

>>12787183
reminds me of based Tolkien.

>>12787183
>mfw the early United States was the most literate, typographically-centered society to ever exist and its all gone because of the telegram walking so television could run.

>>12787312
Reminder that Tolkien was a based and redpilled anarcho-monarchist

>>12787253

Both authors compare themselves to natural forces in the first chapter :)

>>12787312
Damn...I knew Tolkien was based but not this based

>>12787312
we're reaching basedness levels that shouldn't be possible

>>12787263
>>12787302
ah, yes, the ever wise undergrad
kys you insufferable faggot

if you unironically consider moby dick transcendentalis you are an utter retard

>>12787253
They are US northeastern liberal universalist works

>>12787160
Edgar Allen Poe was a faggot who drank himself to death because he couldnt deal with the fact. I want NOTHING to do with him

>>12787312
what did he mean by this?

I miss when america had a enviromentialism boner, the best you get now is just retards thinking solar panels will solve our woes

>Some scholars have suggested that homoerotic sentiments run through his writings and concluded that he was homosexual
> It has been argued that the long paean in Walden to the French-Canadian woodchopper Alek Therien, which includes allusions to Achilles and Patroclus, is an expression of conflicted desire.

>>12787263
doesn't melville repeatedly reject transcendentalism through ahab...?

>>12788701
Did Thoreau really say that? HUH? BASED?

>>12789812
based

>>12789827
Melville and the reader are reflected in Ishmael, not Ahab.
Ahab is the industrialist elite of America, while Ishmael represents the common man, adrift. Melville endorses transcendentalism through Ishmael's embrace of the chaos of the sea and adoration for the brilliance of Moby Dick, while Ahab seeks only to constrain it for his own egotistical gain.

>>12790485
lol no. dont listen to everything your teacher tells you kiddo.

>>12791300
Go ahead then. Provide an alternative instead of a dead end.

>>12790485
I thought it was about the whale.

>>12791325
The sea is Nietzsche’s death of god reflected back at us. There’s nothing to transcend into; it’s all that is left after the human thought-drama of will turns upon itself. Hence why Melville is associated with Dark Romanticism rather than Transcendentalism. Melville’s too devoutly a Bardolator to posit anything like transcendence in the Emersonian sense. He harbors the pessimism of Lear and the complexity of Hamlet.

>>12787334
the final telegram was sent in 2013

>>12791365
I always viewed Moby Dick as a trancendentalist cautionary tale against industrialisation.

Because Ahab and other crew members like Stubbs and Flask don't respect nature to begin with (perhaps best illustrated in the chapter where they carve up the whale and also the steak eating chapter) there can be no trancendentalist salvation for them due to them failing to seek it out. In the end, the sea (the product of nature) consumes the industrious man with complete indifference. That's very in line with trancendentalist thought.

>>12787160
I feel bad for Thoreau that everyone always uses the picture of him with the hideous neckbeard and not the other pic of him where he looks quite suave