3.0

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How do the “American Romantics” Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman expose the entanglements of aesthetic sensibilities with political ideologies and economies? What techniques do they offer for cultivating more ecological styles of perception and pleasure -- styles at odds with, but sometimes also tacit within, systems of extractive capitalism and hyper-consumerism? How might a more robust and widely distributed capacity to sense the active presence of lively material bodies and forces help to forge a way out of or around powerful systems of exploitation? This course reads Thoreau and Whitman, as well as more recent work from indigenous writers, feminist and queer theories, and "new materialist" works of art or performance, with a focus on the nonhuman influences upon human subjectivity-formation. It is in search of ecological, earth-focused models of self.