Tracking Thoreau: Double-crossing Nature and Technology

Capa
Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2005 - 231 páginas
Tracking Thoreau explores the constellation of three central issues in Thoreau's oeuvre: nature, culture, and technology. Dolis reads Thoreau's major works as principally concerned with the composition of the self through writing, through narration, an activity inextricably bound up with the apprehension of structures common to both nature and culture, structures which, in turn, unavoidably implicate style - that is, technique. As did the ancient Greeks. Thoreau understands technology as a defining moment for not only culture, but nature as well, that inaugural act in light of which each is able to appear in the first place. Technology is always already in place at the beginning of things: it occupies the site of subjectivity. Arguing against the most recent trend in Thoreau studies, Dolis contends that, for Thoreau, nature is primordially a construct: it cannot be understood apart from language, through cultural constructions, techniques by means of which the subject composes the object. Both nature and the very nature of nature itself are subject to this single configuration. Subjectivity, in turn, entails its own technology, its style.

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Conteúdo

Economic Technique HomeWork
17
The Nature of Technology Viewing the Construction of Things
58
The Technology of Nature Constructing the View of Things
93
The Nature of Nature Techne The Subject Matter Itself
129
The Technology of Technology Poiesis What Matters to the Subject ItSelf SelfTechnology
149
From Monad to Nomad HomeCosmography
182
Notes
205
Bibliography
221
Index
229
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Página 75 - If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career.
Página 137 - I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.
Página 43 - A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips ; — not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.
Página 169 - I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Página 139 - In the meanwhile there came along a single red ant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus.
Página 159 - Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality...
Página 25 - Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end...
Página 55 - I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

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