Tracking Thoreau

"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. It figures out both nature and the composition of its self as well."--Jacket.