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. The pertinence to the late 20th century of Thoreau's pursuit of independent judgment, ecological foresight, and moral nobility becomes apparent through these engagements. |
Contents
Why Thoreau Hates Politics | 1 |
American Politics | 5 |
Reformers and Dissenters | 8 |
A Night in the Concord Jail | 11 |
Techniques of the Self | 16 |
Moving Inward | 17 |
Idealizing a Friend | 20 |
Keeping Quiet | 23 |
Inflection | 59 |
A Quiet Acknowledgment | 63 |
Thoreau and Haraway | 67 |
Art and Politics | 78 |
The Walden Woods Project | 80 |
Contra Thoreau Contra Politics | 85 |
ArtPolitics | 91 |
A Minor Literature? | 95 |
Going Outside | 25 |
Microvisioning | 26 |
Living Doubly | 30 |
Hoeing Beans | 32 |
Eating with Care | 37 |
Building the Sojourner | 42 |
Writing a Heteroverse | 47 |
Ktaadn and the Mosquito | 48 |
Universe and Heteroverse | 51 |
Swamps Winter Animals and Frogs | 55 |
Mythological Earnestness | 58 |
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acknowledge alert ambiguity American become Bennett called Chapter character civil disobedience Concord contemporary critical culture Cyborgs Deism Deleuze and Guattari describes deterritorialization dialectic of Faith discourse divine Donna Haraway dream E. L. Doctorow earth effect elements enchanted Environmental Management ethical example experience Faith and Enlightenment Foucault Franz Kafka Friend Friendship Gilles Deleuze Golemba Haraway Heaven Hegel Henry David Thoreau Henry Thoreau heteroverse hoeing Holism human Ibid identity imagination individual inflection italics added Journal justice Kafka Kafka's story Ktaadn Kundera language live Maine Woods means Michel Foucault microvision minor literature Modernity and Political moral myth Natural Holism Nietzsche object one's oneself Penal Colony perhaps poetic potential reader Reform Papers rhetorical Richardson sense sensibility social sojourner techniques temperament things Thoreau seeks Thoreau writes Thoreau's Nature Thoreau's tale Thoreauian tion transcendentalizing uncanny Walden Pond Wall of China Week Wild words Writings of Henry Writings/Journal York