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

This work explores how Thoreau crafted a life open to the wild , a term that marks the startling elements of foreigness 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 Thoureau and modern contemporaries: Foucault on identity and power; Haraway on the nature/culture division; Hollywood celebraties on the Walden Woods project; the National Endowment for the Humanities on politics and art; and Kafka on the question of political idealism.