"Peculiar love": Thoreau's erotics.
Item
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Title
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"Peculiar love": Thoreau's erotics.
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Identifier
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AAI9720077
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identifier
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9720077
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Creator
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Brewer, Brian.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Joan Richardson
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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Henry David Thoreau's writing reflects the cultivation and practice of an order of thought predicated on an erotic engagement with the world, a love relation with the whole of the Emersonian "NOT ME" that comprises nature, art, other men and one's own body. This is an alternate, erotic means of knowing the world that Thoreau poses counter to knowledge governed by the intellectual, rational "understanding." Thoreau's alternate order of thought seeks to avert the purposeful, intellectual ratiocination, containment and domination of natural "phenomena" (in its broadest construction) as well as the social systems and cultural practices built upon this domination. Instead, Thoreau envisions an engagement of mind (or, equally, self or Emersonian ME) with the world that operates within what Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization calls "the aesthetic dimension," the space where mind and matter, thought and feeling, intellect and affection are unified rather than divided in an agonistic relation. Marcuse posits this as a necessarily erotic engagement with the world, effected by a re-eroticization of the body's sensual capacities that have been repressed and cathected into the service of culture-building structures, e.g. those designed to perpetuate human reproduction and labor. By detailing parallels between Marcuse's cultural critique and Thoreau's in Walden, then by reading closely Thoreau's discourses on love, friendship, nature and imagination, I argue that the redemptive ideal posed by the liberation of Marcuse's eros is the same redemption Thoreau poses in Walden for the famous "lives of quiet desperation." What is more, though Marcuse sees this redemption as only an ideal, contemporary queer theory provides an alternate perspective for viewing such "peculiar love" as one epistemological consequence of lives--experiences, identifications of self--that run athwart a naturalized heterosexual order, providing the scope to consider Thoreau's entire poetic practice as witness to a queer erotic aesthetic.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
