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1 All the essays gathered in this volume offer, to some degree, scholarly meditations inspired by thinking about Thoreau. Here—in the continuing relevance of his writings to our time, as they were once relevant to his time—resides his essential modernity. His writings mean something different to us now, of course, but what remains central is their capacity to stimulate thought and to address pressing issues in a renewed way. As Laura Dassow Walls emphasizes in her essay in this volume, “Walking West, Gazing East,” “The text we read, if we are to read it at all, let alone read it together in concert, must find a way to stay alive. It must generate and sustain a living network all along the lengths from its creation to our translation.” This idea of a network is supported by her notion of “vascularity,” with its suggestion of nurture and circulation of energy, irrigation, development, relationality, and the way a work is alive by what she calls its “vibration” for us. Laura also insists that “Thoreau means something risky, endangering, like the ‘sweet edge’ of the scimitar.” It is this “edginess,” the fact that his works continue to unsettle rather than “inspire” in a loose sense, that defines his modernity, or continuing relevance. This volume pursues three distinct but parallel lines. First, it fundamentally offers a series of “dialogues”: it asks how Thoreau himself entered into various forms of dialogue with his time (in its historical, social, and economic dimensions ; in its philosophical and religious situation; and in its scientific and epistemological concerns); it asks how we, as readers situated in a very different context (often identified as “postmodernity”), also enter into various forms of dialogue with Thoreau’s work as his writings speak to us, interrogate us, challenge us to consider alternative modes of thinking about economics, science, or François Specq and Laura Dassow Walls Introduction The Manifold Modernity of Henry D. Thoreau 2 Specq and Walls the environment. Of course, our approach to Thoreau’s dialogue with his own time (a dialogue that may variously be described as critical, exhortative, embittered , or humorous) is filtered through our own historically situated concerns as well as our own personal preferences and references. It is precisely this “double articulation” of literary and cultural criticism that makes Thoreau’s writings so lively—open to so many reorientations. Second, this volume suggests that Thoreau himself constantly sought to articulate the timeless and the timely, convinced as he was that it was not only possible or profitable but necessary to widen our views of the universe in ways that were inevitably proper to our historical situation but that simultaneously spoke to our common, eternal condition as human beings, a condition that he viewed as universal. In other words, Thoreau offered a literary anthropology that attended to our inhabiting “a common dwelling,” one not only physical or geographical but also intellectual and “metaphysical” in a broad sense. The ideal that he opposes to what he perceived as “degenerate times” is thus less a nostalgic image of the past than a utopian image of the eternal, from which the present should draw the resources for a better future—thus intrinsically connecting the timeless and the timely. Third, this volume is faithful to the spirit of Thoreau’s intellectual search in its commitment to an exploration that knows no frontiers, one that is decidedly “without bounds” precisely because it is timeless and universal. More specifically, since the starting point for this volume was the first conference ever devoted to Thoreau held on European soil, it can be said that all the contributors , in various ways, articulate their reflections in ways that are transatlantic. Thoreau, like the rest of his fellow Transcendentalists, imbibed and responded to European literatures and philosophies, both ancient and contemporary; thus we, in turn, can explore his works in the light of current intellectual developments on both sides of the Atlantic. The authors of these essays have found useful a variety of contemporary philosophical approaches, including those of John Dewey, Richard Rorty, Hans Georg Gadamer, Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Derrida, and Bruno Latour. Thoreau certainly helps us think more broadly, and it is the germinating power of his thought as well as its persistent challenge to our own thinking that this volume seeks to explore through his connections to philosophy , environmental studies, and political science. As a result, our approach to the question of “Thoreau’s modernity” has deliberately been left as broad as possible. Rather...

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