Thoreau’s Econational Poetics

Abstract:Drawing on Henry David Thoreau’s botanical sketches, translation notebooks, and essays on migrant dwelling, this article reads Thoreau’s ecology in the context of his engagements with Asian literature. According to Thoreau, poetry relinquishes independent subject-agency like plants, is regenerative like air, and resists stabilized meaning like celestial bodies. The article proposes an econational method of engaging with global literature that is developed through Thoreau’s theories of texts as unstable oikoi (oikos being the root of eco) and nations as contingent communities. I argue that his poetics models the relations between texts and readers as open-ended networks rather than linear appropriations, and thus stands in contrast to transnational writing that preserves localized identities in the processes of exchange.