Seeing New Worlds
Seeing New Worlds

Author: Laura Dassow Walls

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

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Thoreau was a poet, a naturalist, a major American writer. Was he also a scientist? He was, Laura Dassow Walls suggests. Her book, the first to consider Thoreau as a serious and committed scientist, will change the way we understand his accomplishment and the place of science in American culture. Walls reveals that the scientific texts of Thoreau s day deeply influenced his best work, from Walden to the Journal to the late natural history essays. Here we see how, just when literature and science were splitting into the two cultures we know now, Thoreau attempted to heal the growing rift. Walls shows how his commitment to Alexander von Humboldt s scientific approach resulted in not only his marriage of poetry and science but also his distinctively patterned nature studies. In the first critical study of his The Dispersion of Seeds since its publication in 1993, she exposes evidence that Thoreau was using Darwinian modes of reasoning years before the appearance of Origin of Species. This book offers a powerful argument against the critical tradition that opposes a dry, mechanistic science to a warm, organic Romanticism. Instead, Thoreau s experience reveals the complex interaction between Romanticism and the dynamic, law-seeking science of its day. Drawing on recent work in the theory and philosophy of science as well as literary history and theory, Seeing New Worlds bridges today s two cultures in hopes of stimulating a fuller consideration of representations of nature. -- Amazon.com.

Dispersion
Dispersion

Author: Branka Arsic

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-07-29

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 150137060X

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Plants are silent, still, or move slowly; we do not have the sense that they accompany us, or even perceive us. But is there something that plants are telling us? Is there something about how they live and connect, how they relate to the world and other plants that can teach us about ecological thinking, about ethics and politics? Grounded in Thoreau's ecology and in contemporary plant studies, Dispersion: Thoreau and Vegetal Thought offers answers to those questions by pondering such concepts as co-dependence, the continuity of life forms, relationality, cohabitation, porousness, fragility, the openness of beings to incessant modification by other beings and phenomena, patience, waiting, slowness and receptivity.

Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing
Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing

Author: Alfred I. Tauber

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003-05

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0520239156

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"Tauber's book is encyclopedic—not only a revealing and comprehensive study of Thoreau but also a full vision of the Romantic Weltanschauung and its relevance to contemporary concerns in philosophy, science, and poetics. While this scope is wildly ambitious, Tauber admirably delivers, always informing his parts with the whole, consistently altering the whole with his parts."—Eric Wilson, author of Emerson's Sublime Science "In arguing for the centrally moral and ethical value of Thoreau's works, Tauber is taking a brave stance in these slippery postmodern times…. It's one thing to praise Thoreau for his opposition to the Mexican War, his philosophy of passive resistance, and his fervent opposition to slavery. It's quite another to argue that his entire project—his whole sense of identity, self-formation, and his relation to nature—is part of a deeply moral enterprise….Thoreau's modernity has been defined in many ways in recent years. Tauber adds another important and distinctive dimension to this discussion."—H. Daniel Peck, John Guy Vassar Professor of English, Vassar College

Touching the World
Touching the World

Author: Paul John Eakin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1992-04-15

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1400820642

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Paul John Eakin's earlier work Fictions in Autobiography is a key text in autobiography studies. In it he proposed that the self that finds expression in autobiography is in fundamental ways a kind of fictive construct, a fiction articulated in a fiction. In this new book Eakin turns his attention to what he sees as the defining assumption of autobiography: that the story of the self does refer to a world of biographical and historical fact. Here he shows that people write autobiography not in some private realm of the autonomous self but rather in strenuous engagement with the pressures that life in culture entails. In so demonstrating, he offers fresh readings of autobiographies by Roland Barthes, Nathalie Sarraute, William Maxwell, Henry James, Ronald Fraser, Richard Rodriguez, Henry Adams, Patricia Hampl, John Updike, James McConkey, and Lillian Hellman. In the introduction Eakin makes a case for reopening the file on reference in autobiography, and in the first chapter he establishes the complexity of the referential aesthetic of the genre, the intricate interplay of fact and fiction in such texts. In subsequent chapters he explores some of the major contexts of reference in autobiography: the biographical, the social and cultural, the historical, and finally, underlying all the rest, the somatic and temporal dimensions of the lived experience of identity. In his discussion of contemporary theories of the self, Eakin draws especially on cultural anthropology and developmental psychology.