{"181381":{"#nid":"181381","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Brittain Fellow Ratiu Presents on Thoreau","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EFirst-year Brittain fellow Iuliu Ratiu recently presented a paper on a panel arranged by the Thoreau Society at the MLA Annual Convention in Boston: \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.mla.org\/program_details?prog_id=329\u0026amp;year=2013\u0022 target=\u0022_blank\u0022\u003Ehttp:\/\/www.mla.org\/program_details?prog_id=329\u0026amp;year=2013\u003C\/a\u003E \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn \u201cThoreau\u2019s Surveying Work at the Crossroads of Identity Politics and Planetarity,\u201d Ratiu demonstrates that the profession of land surveyor is a prerequisite for Thoreau\u2019s ideal study of nature and argues that land surveying is to Thoreau what the lecture circuit had been to Emerson: both a lucrative business enterprise and a draft toward published work. Contributing to recent scholarship analyzing the importance of land surveying to literary studies, Ratiu\u2019s paper shows that Thoreau\u2019s interest and expertise in the \u201cmap genre\u201d challenge both the nineteenth-century\u2019s and the present day\u2019s celebratory rhetoric of Manifest Destiny. By looking at the natural world through the lenses of land surveying, Thoreau creates an alternative natural science in which maps, plans, farm books, and calendars convert raw data into a meaningful pattern (hence, a prototype for observation, planting, cultivating) that underlines the importance of land surveying as a major enterprise of American history. Read this way, Thoreau\u2019s work not only illuminates central issues of American culture such as identity and citizenship but also participates in what has been recently called the spatial turn in American Studies, wherein maps are representations of discursive practices that structure and plot America beyond and beside the essentialist perspective of American exceptionalism.\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":[{"value":"Panel arranged by the Thoreau Society at the MLA Annual Convention in Boston, MA."}],"field_summary":"","field_summary_sentence":"","uid":"27725","created_gmt":"2013-01-08 10:56:31","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:13:26","author":"Carol Senf","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2013-01-08T00:00:00-05:00","iso_date":"2013-01-08T00:00:00-05:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"181371":{"id":"181371","type":"image","title":"Iuliu Ratiu","body":null,"created":"1449179053","gmt_created":"2015-12-03 21:44:13","changed":"1475894828","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:47:08","alt":"Iuliu Ratiu","file":{"fid":"196040","name":"ratiu_iuliu-1.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/ratiu_iuliu-1_0.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/ratiu_iuliu-1_0.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":22358,"path_740":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/ratiu_iuliu-1_0.jpg?itok=Aca0G_AT"}}},"media_ids":["181371"],"groups":[{"id":"1283","name":"School of Literature, Media, and Communication"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[{"id":"54421","name":"American literature"},{"id":"54431","name":"MLA Conference Presentation"},{"id":"54441","name":"MLA Convention"}],"core_research_areas":[{"id":"39501","name":"People and Technology"}],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[],"email":["iuliu.ratiu@lmc.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}