Essay about Self Reliance Rhetorical Analysis - 574 Words.
In examining Emerson’s motivations for the creation of Self-Reliance one must examine the authors past and his ideals. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born into a very religious family; his father was a minister at the First Church of Massachusetts. His ancestry can be traced back to a generation of ministers.
Emerson previews important themes of his essay in each epigraph. Epigraph one encourages self-reliance, the central trait of the new morality he espouses in the essay. Epigraph two celebrates individuality rather than fate as the main influence on a person’s life.
Essays on self-reliance are often assigned to students in the context of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other writers but can also be explored as a secondary theme in other literature works (e.g. Mark Twain), in pop culture, or even by itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, unlike the current 21st century American youth, celebrated the independent individual and scorned self-centered assertions and immature narcissism in his memorable essay “Self-Reliance”. Emerson would condemn the “selfie” generation as the best way to express one’s identity, one’s true self and its narcissistic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson The author. Emerson’s voice in this essay is a confident one that makes controversial and provocative statements designed to move the reader to listen to his or her own voice and ignore societal pressures.
Emerson ’s wish for his age is that people will finally come to understand how ridiculous consistency and conformity are. Conformity to society should therefore be actively opposed, and Emerson hopes that the individual will “reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all.
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson Essay Sample. As one of the leading poets and lecturers of the Transcendentalist movement of the early nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s treatise “Self-Reliance” has attained near-mythic status in American letters.