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The Durable Text: Editing Thoreau

Photo: Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Paul Schacht, Bill Rossi, and Robert Sattelmeyer. Photo by Tom Potter.

A plenary session at the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering featured discussions about the process, problems, breakthroughs, and joys of editing Thoreau texts. View the event at Minuteman Media Network.

Bill Rossi, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oregon and recent recipient of the Thoreau Society Medal, discusses the “provocative and puzzling” journal entry of November 23, 1860. The short entry “imagines a gradual but dramatic transformation. of the Concord landscape at some time in the indefinite future,” where cultivated land becomes deserted pastures, where the apple and perhaps all exotic trees and shrubs have disappeared, and “perchance the red man once more thread his way through the mossy swamp-like primitive wood.”

What is this transformative re-wilding all about? Was the entry inserted later into the journal after many of Thoreau’s “thought experiments”? How might this entry have come to be written? Rossi examines Thoreau’s faith in nature as a cyclical and restorative force.

Paul Schacht, professor of English at SUNY Geneseo, Director of Digital Thoreau, and recent recipient of the Thoreau Society Medal, takes an in-depth look at what happened to the Walden manuscript after Thoreau’s death in 1862. What can we learn from direct inspection as well as transcripts of the Walden manuscript as a material record of Thoreau’s revision process?

Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Distinguished Professor Emerita at Pennsylvania State University, examines the pleasures of editing Thoreau and the “maddening” process of deciphering Thoreau’s handwriting. “Just because important scholars have for years reviewed the manuscript you turned your attention to,” she says, “does not mean that they didn’t miss what you were looking for or that they didn’t make mistakes. In fact they did both.”

Robert Sattelmeyer, Regents Professor of English Emeritus and former Director of the Honors College at Georgia State University, discusses how the journal evolved as a printed work and came into the Thoreau canon. He looks at “editorial decisions, whether personal, economic, or theoretical,” that have profoundly influenced Thoreau’s reception by both academics and the general public, and provides a brief history of the most impactful of these decisions.

 

 

 

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Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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