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Readings from the works of Thoreau and Whitman, with an eye toward how they explore the multi-specied process of influence upon subjectivity-formation. “Influence” names the incursion, absorption, digestion, and transformation of an outside (including bodies, ideas, affects, elements, moods, atmospheres) into a subjectivity experienced as an inside. What are the powers and limits of Whitman’s and Thoreau’s experiments with language and writing (rhetoric, syntax, imagery, myth) as they seek to induce, inflect, combat, and transform influences? What role do their physical encounters with nonhuman agencies (of plants, animals, objects, divinities) play in, first, the way such encounters are turned into words (depicted and described) and, second, in the degree and kind of influence that those encounters and words have upon us as readers? Cross listed with Political Science