Henry David Thoreau's De-genera Description

  • Gigliola Nocera
Keywords: description, narration, diegesis, Henry David Thoreau

Abstract

This essay focuses on the relationship between "description" and "narration" in the works of Henry David Thoreau. Through his intertextual universe - that of such Natural History writers as Charles Darwin, Gilbert White or John Muir - Thoreau adopts in his writing a model that is, on a reduced scale, the same model of operation as the universe. According to this model, "description" equals diegesis while "narration" equals Roland Barthes' "fluctuating sequence of stasis".

Published
1995-09-01
Section
Articles