Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the WildThoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild explores how Thoreau crafted a life open to 'the Wild, ' a term that marks the startling element of foreignness in every object of experience, however familiar. Thoreau's encounters with nature, Bennett argues, allowed him to resist his all-too-human tendency toward intellectual laziness, social conformity, and political complacency. Bennett pursues this theme by constructing a series of dialogues between Thoreau and our contemporaries: Foucault on identity and power, Haraway on the nature/culture of division, Hollywood celebrities on the Walden Woods Project, the National Endowment for the Humanities on politics and art, and Kafka on the question of political idealism |
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acknowledge alert ambiguity American animals become Bennett called Chapter character civil disobedience Concord contingent critical cultural Cyborgs Deism describes deterritorialize dialectic of Faith discourse divine Donna Haraway dream E. L. Doctorow earth effect elements enchanted Environmental ethical example experience Faith and Enlightenment Franz Kafka Freud Friend Friendship Gilles Deleuze Golemba Haraway Heaven Hegel Henry David Thoreau Henry Thoreau heteroverse hoeing Holism human Ibid identity imagination individual inflection Journal justice Kafka Kafka's story Ktaadn Kundera language live Maine Woods means Michel Foucault microvision minor literature moral myth Natural Holism Nietzsche object one's oneself Penal Colony perhaps poetic political potential present Princeton reader Reform Papers rhetorical Richardson sense sensibility social sojourner techniques things Thoreau seeks Thoreau writes Thoreau's Nature Thoreau's tale Thoreauian thought tion transcendentalizing uncanny University Press Walden Pond Walden Woods Project Wall of China Week Wild words Writings of Henry Writings/Journal York