"Quoting Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room on One’s Own”, Sarah Frantz and Katharina Rennhak, in chapter 1 of Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters 1750-200, remind us that “women do not write books about men”-at least, they are not supposed to. This dissertation is itself a polemic, straining the possibilities of friendship in the service of queerness. The question of how one actually transitions from melancholia to disidentification cannot be adequately answered with terms like Stuart Hall’s ‘oppositional reading’ or Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘de/reterritorialization.’ I also suggest that queer utopian thinking and poststructuralism are more compatible than previously argued. This project complexifies Erin Rand’s research on polemics, using Deleuze’s multiplicity not only to explain why polemics are unpredictable, but also to address what Sarah Hallenbeck has referred to as “the crisis of agency.” I suggest an expansion of José Esteban Muñoz’s research. This incongruity is analyzed using not only Burke’s theories of literary form and literature as equipment for living, but also Deleuze’s process philosophy and Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses of the war machine and their spatial analysis. To investigate this friendship and Walden’s accommodations of faux friendship, I construct a Burkean perspective by incongruity using research in the nature-writing and rhetoric disciplines that intersect with Thoreauvian studies. Walden’s friendship with its reader is the agency that accomplishes what Henry Golemba and Lawrence Buell have noted as a blurring of the boundary between reader and text.
Walden delivers on Thoreau’s theory of friendship from his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. I combine a close reading of Walden with selective study of the text’s reception.
Thoreau had already been experimenting with what Branka Arsić identified as “literalization.” Nevertheless, a period of crisis, detailed by Robert Milder, made him aware of what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have referred to as the melancholic’s blind skill of “demetaphorization.” I suggest that Thoreau exploited this skill to produce Walden’s unique ability to feed on and, as Henry Abelove and Henry Golemba have suggested, awaken its reader’s desires.
This project begins with a situational analysis that identifies the melancholic antecedents of Walden in Thoreau’s life and his choices that led to the illumination of his melancholia. While many have investigated Thoreau’s queerness, there has been little notice of Walden’s queerness. Digital Thoreau as a whole is a multi-faceted web resource that offers interesting new opportunities for scholarly research as well as for teaching and public engagement with Thoreau’s influential works.
#Walden yale annotations pdf archive#
The third project is a student created digital archive of the papers of Thoreau scholar Walter Harding, which is primarily a pedagogical exercise in digital humanities for the students of SUNY Geneseo. In the second project a very innovative and engaging social reading platform has been created in order to facilitate community and student driven annotation of both Walden and his 1849 essay Resistance to Civil Government. This allows multiple versions of the text to be represented simultaneously in a dynamic environment, which can be a valuable resource to Thoreau scholars, particularly for those interested in researching the genetic aspect of the text. The first of these is a fluid text edition of Thoreau’s most famous work Walden. Digital Thoreau is a web resource comprising three digital projects related to the work of Henry David Thoreau created at SUNY Geneseo.
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