Techno-Thoreau. Aesthetics, ecology and the Capitalocene

EN. This essay serves the double purpose of investigating the aesthetic dimensions of Thoreau’s environmental philosophy while examining the philosophical and political implications of its capacity to break down the boundaries between the natural and the technological landscape. Deeply rooted in an Emersonian transcendentalist tradition viewing nature as an organized and holistic “whole,” Thoreau’s ecophilosophy seeks to reconcile the idealistic pole with the empirical pole in its approach to natural and technological landscapes, objects and situations. Consequently, this book starts by considering Thoreau as a “techno-author” who does not shun from embracing technological change in the Romantic period and proceeds to develop an alternative, proto-ecocritical form of the aesthetic of the sublime. It also calls for a reconsideration of Thoreau’s poetics and its legacy against the background of the “toxic sublime,” which sheds a new light on the methods and purposes of ecocriticism as we