La parenté sauvage dans « Ktaadn » de Thoreau
This study explores the paradoxes of the American legacy as it is envisaged in « Ktaadn », the first of the Maine Woods narratives, in which Thoreau, back in Walden, relates one of his excursions into the heart of the primitive Maine forest. Voyaging with loggers up the Penobscot river into the « un...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Association Française d'Etudes Américaines
2016-01-01
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| Series: | Transatlantica |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7261 |
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| Summary: | This study explores the paradoxes of the American legacy as it is envisaged in « Ktaadn », the first of the Maine Woods narratives, in which Thoreau, back in Walden, relates one of his excursions into the heart of the primitive Maine forest. Voyaging with loggers up the Penobscot river into the « unsettled » wilderness, Thoreau makes the American experience par excellence of a salvaging corporeal fusion with a world forever new, which he contemplates as his fascinating legacy. However, this « transcendentalist » feeling of a harmonious kinship between the self and the world is followed by the anti-pastoral spectacle of Mount Ktaadn and the terrifying discovery of a nature indifferent to man and which cannot be inherited. Ultimately, it is this impossible inheritance that Thoreau, writing « Ktaadn », seeks to bequeath to his reader. |
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| ISSN: | 1765-2766 |