LITR 4232: American Renaissance

UHCL, spring 2002

Student Research Proposal

Elizabeth Little

     I plan to write a traditional analytic/research essay (option 1).  The primary texts I plan to work with are The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson  and Walden and other writings by Henry David Thoreau.  I am interested in these texts because of the choice of both writers to pay close attention to the natural world around them.  They make no apologies for their intrigue or their time spent alone following their impulses to enjoy simplicity.  They give the beauty around them power with their words. 
     I am interested in these texts together because I sense similarities between them.  In doing research in the primary and secondary texts I hope to find shared ideas, words, views, or themes that connect the two authors' works.  Since I have not began any research on this topic, I am wondering if the ideas of the two writers are obviously related or the complete opposite?  I wonder if there are close relationships between the works of each writer that go beyond their views of nature?  I also wonder if there has been much written comparing the two.

Dear Liz,

I confess I've never thought of studying Thoreau and Dickinson together, but now that the idea's been proposed, it seems obvious, so proceed. I don't know of any criticism on this pairing specifically, but you could key their names into an MLA search in the library--you'll probably come up with something. You might also approach them through consideration of them as nature writers. One trend recently, though not a big one, has been "eco-criticism" (again you could do a keyword search in MLA), which tries to raise nature writing to a level of physical and social as well as spiritual significance.

Back to the writers, I wonder if ED ever read Thoreau or heard of him? (I think he's about 19 years older than her, but his books weren't that widely known, even if she was well-read.) Anyway, they rose from the same state of Massachusetts, so the "nature" they live in is local to each other's. One point of comparison and contrast might be her garden with his wilderness. However, both of them are highly sensitive to intrusions from the increasingly mechanized world beyond, in the form of railroads, guns, etc.

Stay with it. If nothing else, you could organize it in terms of the puzzle of putting these two individualistic and contrary writers together, how in some ways it's obvious but in other ways resistant. What does one gain from thinking of these two writers together?