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).

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)