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List of contents
Introduction: Thoreau’s Vegetal Ontology: The Aerial, the Rootless and the Analogous
Branka Arsic (Columbia University, USA)
1. Thoreau Experiments with Natural Influences
Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
2. A Material Faith: Thoreau's Terrennial Turn
Laura Dassow Walls (Notre Dame University, USA)
3. Auto-Heteronomy: Thoreau’s Circuitous Return to the Vegetal World
Michael Marder (University of the Basque Country, Spain)
4. Thoreau’s Garden Politics
Antoine Traisnel (University of Michigan, USA)
5. "Wild Thinking" and Vegetal Intelligence in Thoreau's Later Writings
Michael Jonik (Sussex University, UK)
6. Green Fire: Thoreau’s Forest Figuration
Monique Allewaert (University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA)
7. The Riddle of Forest Succession
Mark Noble (Georgia State University, USA)
8. Low-Tech Thoreau; or, Remediations of the Human in The Dispersion of Seeds
Jason Gladstone (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA)
9. Chastity & Vegetality: On Thoreau’s Eco-erotics
Cristin Ellis (University of Mississippi, USA)
10. Thoreau’s Pomontology in 'Wild Apples'
Vesna Kuiken (University at Albany, State University of New York, USA)
11. ‘Wild only like myself’: Thoreau at Home with Plants
Mary Kuhn (University of Virginia, USA)
12. Roots, Seeds, & Thoreauvian Trans-temporality: Poetry in the Common Sense
Gillian Osborne (Harvard Extension School, USA)
About the author
Branka Arsic is Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, USA. She is the author of Bird Relics, Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard, 2015), On Leaving, A Reading in Emerson (Harvard, 2010), Passive Constitutions or 71/2 Times Bartleby (Stanford UP, 2007). She is co-editor (with Cary Wolfe) of The Other Emerson: New Approaches, Divergent Paths (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and editor of The American Impersonal (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Summary
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.
Foreword
Mobilizes eminent ecological thinkers on the logic of Thoreau's vegetal thoughts with regard to the contemporary ecological crisis.
Additional text
With animal studies already a thriving site of scholarly inquiry, Dispersion turns our attention to the quieter potentialities of the vegetal world. This capacious and imaginative collection makes clear how Thoreau laid the ground for this next phase in the ongoing project of thinking beyond our anthropocentric view. Arsic, one of the most inventive voices in this endeavor, has brought together a dream team of emerging and established scholars, whose work here offers a cornucopia of insights along with new roots to track.
