Thoreau and the Capitalocene

Abstract

This essay will serve the double purpose of investigating the aesthetic dimensions of Thoreau’s environmental philosophy as depicted in his classic memoir Walden (1854) while examining the philosophical and political implications of its tendency to break down the boundaries between natural and technological landscapes. Although critics have tended to identify Thoreau as deeply rooted in an Emersonian transcendentalist tradition viewing nature as an organized and holistic “whole”, I will argue that Thoreau’s ecophilosophy seeks to reconcile the idealistic with the empirical pole and highlight the tensions between natural and technological objects and situations. I will start by studying how Thoreau approaches man-made technologies and develops a proto-ecocritical form of the sublime. I will also argue that a reconsideration of Thoreau’s poetics sheds a new light on the goals of environmental (non)fiction and urges the reader to reconsider the concept of the Anthropocene as the Capitalocene.

Keywords

• Thoreau
• technology
• sublime
• Capitalocene
• ecocriticism
• ecophilosophy