Techno-Thoreau

Aesthetics, Ecology and the Capitalocene

David Lombard

• Publisher: Quodlibet
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9788822910752
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

EN. 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.IT. Questo saggio si propone il duplice scopo di studiare la dimensione estetica della filosofia ambientale di Thoreau e di analizzare le implicazioni filosofico-politiche della sua capacità di abbattere i confini tra paesaggio naturale e paesaggio tecnologico. Profondamente radicata nella tradizione trascendentalista di Emerson, che vede lo spazio naturale come un "tutto" organizzato e olistico, l'eco-filosofia di Thoreau cerca di riconciliare – con il suo approccio ai paesaggi naturali e tecnologici, agli oggetti e alle situazioni – il polo idealistico e il polo empirico. Pertanto, questo libro inizia prendendo in considerazione Thoreau come "tecno-autore", che non si rifiuta di accettare i cambiamenti tecnologici verificatisi nel periodo romantico, ma sviluppa una forma alternativa e proto-ecocritica dell'estetica del sublime. L'autore cerca anche di riesaminare la poetica di Thoreau e la sua eredità sullo sfondo del "sublime tossico", gettando così nuova luce sui metodi e sulle finalità dell'ecocritica, nonché sulle recenti tendenze della (non)fiction ambientalista.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abram, David

1996 The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books).

Adams, Henry

1999 The Education of Henry Adams (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Alaimo, Stacy

2010 Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

Antonetta, Susanne

2001 Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (Washington: Counterpoint).

Augé, Marc,

1995 Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. by John Howe (London: Verso).

Barrett, Laura

2001 “‘How the dead speak to the living’: Intertextuality and the Postmodern Sublime in White Noise,” Journal of Modern Literature 25, 2, pp. 97-113.

Bartram, William

2003 Travels of William Bartram (New York: Dover Publications).

Baudrillard, Jean

1988 Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

Berthold, Daniel

2004 “Aldo Leopold: In Search of a Poetic Science,” Human Ecology Review 11, 3 (December), pp. 205-14.

Brady, Emily

2012 “Reassessing Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature in the Kantian Sublime,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 46 1 (Spring), pp. 91-109.

Bragard, Véronique

2013 “Introduction: Languages of Waste: Matter and Form in our Garb-age,” ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment), ed. Scott Slovic, 20, 3 (Summer), pp. 459-63.

Brooks, Paul

2014 Speaking for Nature: The Literary Naturalists, from Transcendentalism to the Birth of the American Environmental Movement (Mineola: Dover Publications).

Buell, Lawrence

2001 Writing for an Endangered World: literature, culture, and environment in the U.S. and beyond (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).

Byerly, Alison

1996 “The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and the National Park System,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, eds. Cheryll Glotfelty & Harold Fromm (Athens: The University of Georgia Press), pp. 52-68.

Campagne, Armel

2017 Le Capitalocène. Aux racines historiques du dérèglement climatique (Paris: Éditions Divergences).

Carson, Rachel

2000 Silent Spring (London: Penguin Classics).

Corey, Joshua

2012 “A Long Foreground: Exploring the Postmodern Pastoral,” in The Arcadia Project, eds. Joshua Corey & G.C. Waldrep (Boise: Ashatha Press), pp. 1-31.

Cramer, Jeffrey S.

2012 “Introduction,” in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New York: Penguin Books), pp. xi-xxvii.

Crawford, Lawrence

1984 “Viktor Shklovskij: Différance in Defamiliarization,” Comparative Literature 36, 3 (Summer), pp. 209-19.

Crist, Eileen

2016 “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakla...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• THOREAU AND THE TECHNO-NATURAL LANDSCAPE
• DECONSTRUCTING THE NATURAL SUBLIME
• THOREAU, CAPITALISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME
• TOXIC MECHANIZATION: SENSES AND ENVIROMENT
• TOXIC WASTE: SELF AND ENVIROMENT
• POST-THOREAUVIANISM AND ECOCRITICISM
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ABSTRACT
• BIOGRAPHY