David Lombard
Techno-Thoreau. Aesthetics, Ecology and the Capitalocene
Quodlibet, coll. "Elements", 2019.
96 p.
€ 8,50
ISBN: 9788822903709
This essay serves the double purpose of investigating the aesthetic dimensions of Thoreau’s environmental philosophy while examining the philosophical and political implications of its capacity to break down the boundaries between the natural and the technological landscape. Deeply rooted in an Emersonian transcendentalist tradition viewing nature as an organized and holistic “whole,” Thoreau’s ecophilosophy seeks to reconcile the idealistic pole with the empirical pole in its approach to natural and technological landscapes, objects and situations. Consequently, this book starts by considering Thoreau as a “techno-author” who does not shun from embracing technological change in the Romantic period and proceeds to develop an alternative, proto-ecocritical form of the aesthetic of the sublime. It also calls for a reconsideration of Thoreau’s poetics and its legacy against the background of the “toxic sublime,” which sheds a new light on the methods and purposes of ecocriticism as well as on recent trends in environmental (non)fiction.
Contents
- Thoreau and the techno‐natural landscape
- 1. Techno-Thoreau
- 2. Why Aesthetics?
- 3. The Toxic Sublime and Ecocriticism
- Deconstructing the Natural Sublime
- 1. The Natural or Burkean Sublime
- 2. Emerson, Whitman, and the Egotistical Sublime
- Thoreau, Capitalism and the Technological Sublime
- 1. Narrowing the Gap between Divine Nature and Human Technology
- 2. Walden in the Capitalocene
- Toxic Mechanization: Senses and Environment
- 1. Toxic Mechanization in A Sand County Almanac
- 2. Refocusing Perception: Technology and the Senses
- Toxic Waste: Self and Environment
- 1. Silent Spring and the Toxic Sublime
- 2. Transcendentalist Consumerism in White Noise
- Post-Thoreauvianism and Ecocriticism
- 1. (Into the) Wild
- 2. Walden on Wheels
- Bibliography
- Abstract
- Biography