Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild

By Jane Bennett

Book Overview

Thoreau'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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0742521419
• ISBN13: 9780742521414
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"