Austin Williams
Utah Valley State College
Subject Listing - Literature
Advisor: Dr. Ryan Simmons
Thursday, Oral Session 2, Presentation 2, Owen Hall 237
WALDEN AND THE POSTMODERN CONDITION
This paper advocates a new reading of Thoreau's Walden through a postmodernist lens. Thoreau's report of his Walden Pond experiment serves as a prophetic antecedent to the Postmodern Condition as identified by Jean-François Lyotard 130 years later. Even though Thoreau's experiment was famously concerned with simplification, I argue that his analysis exemplifies the postmodern approach of embracing complexity through experimentation. Walden thus becomes a transcendentalist-poststructuralist double-bind, advocating moves toward both simplicity and complexity as it explores the question of what "make[s] a world?" Thoreau's engagement with this question reflects both the transcendentalist doctrine of unification and the postmodern essence of representing the unrepresentable. As Lyotard summarizes postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives," Thoreau's report reveals his incredulity toward the metanarrative of free market capitalism as represented in Adam Smith's Profit Motive and as implemented in Thoreau's contemporary society. Thoreau asks, "Where is this division of labor to end?", and a comparative examination of both Walden and The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge provides an answer that labor division has produced the following three conditions: 1) knowledge and learning are no longer ends in themselves, 2) knowledge is commodified and taught only if there exists a demand for it (it is no longer autotrophic, but instead is placed into a producer/consumer relationship), 3) knowledge is reduced to the functional role of supporting the social institution that caused its devaluation in the first place. In particular, I examine Thoreau's ideas concerning a proper university education from the perspective of Lyotard's account of how knowledge is produced. As "knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, [and] loses its use value," the transitive result of the division of labor is ultimately the death of the university.
Advisor: Dr. Ryan Simmons, Assistant Professor, English & Literature, Utah Valley State College, Orem, UT