Iuliu Ratiu publishes in The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies

Iuliu Ratiu’s essay “Land Surveying as a Poetic Exercise in Walden and ‘Walking'” appeared recently in The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, N.S. Vol. 21, 2013.

Ratiu’s study contributes to recent scholarship analyzing the importance of land surveying to literary studies and shows that Thoreau’s interest and expertise in the “map genre” challenge the celebratory rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism. Part of a larger project which argues that space figurations play a fundamental role in Henry D. Thoreau’s numerous attempts to reform the American Self, this essay analyzes land surveying as a literary trope in Walden and “Walking.” Thus, Ratiu’s main concern is to show that Thoreau’s incorporation of land surveying into his literary texts amounts to a critique of the pervading ideology of antebellum America and to argue that his surveying skills reverberate through his writing in a way that responds to shifts in space and land configurations between colonial and antebellum America.

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Christine Hoffmann

About Christine Hoffmann

Christine Hoffmann (PhD University of Arkansas, MFA Art Institute of Chicago) studies the shifting standards for credibility and utility that develop inside post-Gutenberg and post-digital rhetorical environments. Her scholarly work has been published in College Literature, the CEA Critic, PLL, the CEA Forum and, somewhat randomly, Slayage: the Online Journal of Buffy Studies. A few short stories can be found in Make magazine, Eclectica and Loose Change. She also blogs regularly on TECHStyle, the forum for digital pedagogy and research by the Georgia Tech Brittain Fellows. Christine looks forward to connecting the teaching of multimodal composition to her research into rhetorics of struggle, cultures of collecting, and the advantages of copious expression.
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