Dispersion

Branka Arsic is Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of American Literature in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, USA. She is the author, most recently, of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (2016), which was awarded the MLA James Russell Lowell prize for the outstanding book of 2016. She has also written On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (2010), and a book on Melville entitled Passive Constitutions or 7½ Times Bartleby (2007). She co-edited (with Kim Evans) a collection of essays on Melville, entitled Melville’s Philosophies (Bloomsbury, 2017) and (with Cary Wolfe) a collection of essays on Emerson, entitled The Other Emerson: New Approaches, Divergent Paths (2010).

The strongest essays in Dispersion shed valuable fresh light on Thoreau’s thinking about the relation—and dis-relation—between human and vegetable.

• Introduction: Thoreau’s Vegetal Ontology: The Aerial, the Rootless and the Analogous Branka Arsic (Columbia University, USA)1. Thoreau Experiments with Natural InfluencesJane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University, USA)2. A Material Faith: Thoreau's Terrennial TurnLaura Dassow Walls (Notre Dame University, USA)3. Auto-Heteronomy: Thoreau’s Circuitous Return to the Vegetal WorldMichael Marder (University of the Basque Country, Spain)4. Thoreau’s Garden PoliticsAntoine Traisnel (University of Michigan, USA) 5. "Wild Thinking" and Vegetal Intelligence in Thoreau's Later WritingsMichael Jonik (Sussex University, UK)6. Green Fire: Thoreau’s Forest FigurationMonique Allewaert (University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA)7. The Riddle of Forest SuccessionMark Noble (Georgia State University, USA)8. Low-Tech Thoreau; or, Remediations of the Human in The Dispersion of SeedsJason Gladstone (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA)9. Chastity & Vegetality: On Thoreau’s Eco-eroticsCristin 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 PlantsMary Kuhn (University of Virginia, USA)12. Roots, Seeds, & Thoreauvian Trans-temporality: Poetry in the Common SenseGillian Osborne (Harvard Extension School, USA)