Charles Ives considered each one of the New England Transcendentalists heroes, having grown up reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and many other staples of the New England classics. Of all of the Transcendentalists, Thoreau was the writer whom Ives related to the most. His time in solitude in a cabin near Walden Pond fascinated the young Charlie, who read Walden with his father as a boy in Danbury, Connecticut. This thesis explores Ives's use of Thoreau in his compositions. The thesis itself is divided into two different parts: the first two chapters explore Ives's connections with New England Transcendentalism, his view of a pastoral ideal, and Thoreau's Walden, while Chapters 3, 4, and 5 include my own analyses of each piece that I chose to represent Thoreau. I started this process by analyzing Ives's Concord Sonata, piecing important motives together. Then, I explored different sources, such as Ives's Memos and Essays Before a Sonata, J. Peter Burkholder's All Made of Tunes, and Stuart Feder's “'Thoreau Was Definitely There': The Ives-Thoreau Connection” from Thoreau's World and Ours. Feder's article, which includes speculation of “Thoreau” pieces in a psychoanalytical and musicological light, provided me with a guide of which pieces to include. I analyzed each of these pieces in many different ways and concluded that through text, musical borrowing, motivic patterns, use of color, and Transcendental undertones, there are connections between these pieces. Through this, I analyzed other pieces to search for more connections to Thoreau, concluding that Thoreau is connected to many of Ives's works.

The title of this dissertation, The Problems of Leisure in the Industrial-Era US, riffs on a phrase that became common amongst American academics in the 1970s: “the problem of leisure.” For the industrial-era American bourgeoisie, however, leisure wasn't a problem but many problems. The crystallization of leisure in its modern form—clearly defined, regularly recurring, and commercially exploitable periods of free time—created a host of fears and desires that, in turn, precipitated many different responses, including the two that I examine in this project: mid-nineteenth-century liberal efforts to control working-class uses of leisure time by “improving” working-class tastes, and the later efforts of modernists to distinguish their own uses of leisure from the purportedly more commercialized and degraded leisure practices of others, especially other within the middle class. The former efforts were spearheaded by William Ellery Channing, whose gospel of culture did two critical things. First, it insisted that culture, which Channing defined as the development of our God-given powers, required spiritual, as opposed to economic, forms of wealth. This argument helped to neutralize what I claim was the anti-capitalist potential of culture, the way it, more so than the older bourgeois conception of legitimate leisure (recreation), had the capacity to inspire a critique of the division of labor and of industrial capitalism more generally. Second, Channing's gospel posited the spread of “the means of culture” (“Self-Culture” 22)—in the forms of parks, picture galleries, lectures, and other publically provisioned, non-commercial forms of leisure—as the most effective solution to the amusement problem, the problem of working-class people consuming commercialized forms of pleasure that social reformers deemed morally degrading and socially disruptive. But my case studies of two other writers, Henry Thoreau and Ernest Hemingway, suggest that, as the demand for culturally san (open full item for complete abstract)

When Literary scholars take up Kentucky writer Harlan Hubbard, it usually falls within the context of Henry David Thoreau, who greatly influenced Hubbard's work. Writers often praise Hubbard's practical commitment to Thoreauvian philosophy, but in doing so, they limit the depth of his language. These assessments particularly underscore the lack of symbolism present in Hubbard's text. In this paper, I argue that Hubbard's work deserves its own analysis, particularly in terms of his engagement with Thoreau—a relationship writers notice but have not explored in any depth. Hubbard's Payne Hollow, an essentially symbolic text, engages in a literary discussion with Thoreau's Walden. Hubbard answers Thoreau's provocations specifically through symbols, in an attempt to define intentional living and the limitations of perspective. This paper focuses on one particularly salient symbol from Walden that Hubbard re-defines: “Sky water” (473). This image represents, for Thoreau, an intentional picture one must deliberately will the eye to see. Hubbard's text reflects that picture, offering his own challenges to the concept of deliberation.

What I Lived for addresses themes of identity and the projection of identity. In this series, the imagery combined in each piece constructs a narrative regarding the wearer's connection with nature, or feelings of biophelia. It becomes evident that more important than the wearer's actual communion with the outdoors is the notion that others would associate the natural world with the wearer. While such identities we construct for ourselves may not hold up over extreme testing, through the completion of this thesis body of work it becomes clear that they are nonetheless critical for self awareness.

The real question at hand with the study of any work of prose literature is not related at all to the textual contents-the who, the what and the how that comprise its narrative-but the why. The attempt to understand the reasons behind the events described is often undergone in conjunction with a degree of considering the author's own role or purpose in the given written endeavor. These considerations are framed in their relationship to the reader, forcing the reader to become an active participant in something which amounts to an interaction with a text. This three-step process is, at bottom, the process by which an academic studies a written work. It describes the fundamental relation of author-to-text-to-reader, and leads to one idea: at bottom, the purpose for studying a literary work is not merely to reflect upon the text itself, but the text in relation to whoever is studying it. When a reader considers the text in relation to himself, what the reader is implicitly doing is examining himself in relation to a larger meaning, a meaning which is derived from recognition of this larger system created in the relationship between text and reader.

The guiding questions of this essay are: What is meant by dwelling? And, how is it that people dwell? In the process of approaching these questions, several key terms are employed. These terms are: dwelling; making; technique; modern technology; and the Gestell of modern technology. Gestell, a term borrowed from the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger, describes an orientation to the physical world unique to the apparatus of modern technology and anathema to dwelling. Dwelling is understood through notions of gathering and relationality: how practices of dwelling weave together a multiplicity of things and experiences. Making, here, refers to that aspect of dwelling which constructs regions and transforms space into made place. Yet, the essay is also attuned to how dwelling takes care, that is, how it makes meaning and thus makes sense. Modern technology represents the process whereby the centrality of technique is made peripheral to production, externalized. It suggests the erosion of meaningful technique in modernity and how this erosion effects the characteristically modern experience of alienation. Four textual sites frame the investigation: First, are selections from the later writings of Heidegger on technology and the plight of dwelling. Second, is an engagement with the writing of anthropologist Tim Ingold. In Ingold, both the dwelling perspective and technique are given a more complex ethnological and environmental elaboration. The other two sites provide the actual sociographic settings in which these terms are enacted and tested: Bronislaw Malinowski's classic, early twentieth-century ethnographic account of Melanesian garden making, Coral Gardens and Their Magic: Soil-tilling and Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands; with particular attention to the process of new garden construction. And Henry David Thoreau's Walden, an experiment in construction and cultivation made in explicit tension with, if not resistance to, the categories and expectations (open full item for complete abstract)

In this study, I explore Walden as a place of pilgrimage. Walden Pond is located in Concord, Massachusetts, a place associated with Henry David Thoreau, a 19th century icon of American environmentalism. The site of his simple dwelling (and the focus of his book by the same name) is now a state park and national landmark that receives over half a million recreational users and tourists each year, in addition to visitors with a particular interest in Thoreau's life and writing. I took two approaches to Walden's sacred geography, using phenomenological methods to explore the poetics of pilgrimage and a hermeneutic reading of the landscape to interpret Walden's sacred space. In-depth interviews of ten Walden pilgrims provided the basis for a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to eliciting themes of pilgrim movement and connection. I further explored the themes of journey, ritual and stillness; and person, place and text in the pilgrim experience. I approached the politics of place through a critical hermeneutic reading of the historic and contemporary landscape. Here, Chidester and Linenthal's conception of the production of sacred space provided the basis for reading Walden's sacred geography in terms of ritualization, interpretation and the contested politics of place. The theme of person, place and text was taken up again from the gatekeeper perspective. This dissertation contributes to the literature of pilgrimage and place by bringing the perspectives of poetics and politics together in the study of Walden. By drawing on both a hermeneutics of suspicion to explore the production of space, and a hermeneutics of recollection to recover the phenomenal experience of pilgrimage, we move beyond the mystical naivete of a purely poetic perspective and the nihilism associated with a solely political approach to understanding sacred space.