Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau

Branka Arsić

Published by Harvard University Press 2016

Bird Relics

Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau

Branka Arsić

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674495364

Overview
Contents

About this book

Branka Arsić shows that Thoreau developed a theory of vitalism in response to his brother’s death. Through grieving, he came to see life as a generative force into which everything dissolves and reemerges. This reinterpretation, based on sources overlooked by critics, explains many of Thoreau’s more idiosyncratic habits and obsessions.

Author / Editor information

Arsic Branka :

Branka Arsic is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Reviews

[Bird Relics] reorients our understanding of Thoreau’s materialist vitalism. Arsić’s reading of both canonical texts and understudied fragments uncover a radical philosophy of life—a vibrant ontology in which writing about what generates our experience also means blurring conventional distinctions between the realistic and the fantastic, animate bodies and inanimate ones, what it means to live and what it means to die. Readers compelled by turns to materialism, ecology, and ontology in recent criticism could hardly hope for a better introduction to lesser-known features of Thoreau’s idiosyncratic body of work…Bird Relics begins by unfolding a stunning, if also heartrending, theory of perpetual mourning that becomes the centerpiece of her approach to Thoreau’s philosophy of life.
-- Mark Noble Los Angeles Review of Books

Arsić constructs a subtle and exhilarating argument in which Thoreau’s take on vegetable and animal life, as well as his theory of mourning, becomes a radically novel understanding of nineteenth-century thought in the Americas. Bird Relics will have profound consequences for how we think about personal identity, the distinction between animate and inanimate, human and non-human, sacred and profane. We will never read Thoreau in the same way again.
-- Colin Dayan, author of Haiti, History, and the Gods

This book will revolutionize the way serious scholars read Thoreau. Nothing like it exists or is likely to appear in the near future. The work is continuously and exceptionally original.
-- Edward Mooney, Syracuse University

Arsić discovers in Thoreau’s corpus a man deeply affected by his brother’s death, but also a man who turns his brother’s death into the occasion for a renewed understanding of life’s vitality—of life as vitality. Her readings are fresh and original; they are also layered through and through with a depth of learning uncommon in contemporary scholarship. To borrow a word she uses in her account of Thoreau, I think this is a ‘stunning’ book.
-- Lloyd Pratt, University of Oxford

In Bird Relics, Branka Arsić delves into Thoreau’s writings, with particular attention to the Indian Notebooks and unpublished bird notebooks, to trace the way his thinking about nature developed over the years into a kind of pan-vitalism, which sees the generative forces of life at work in death, disease, and natural decay.
-- Robert Pogue Harrison New York Review of Books

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction: On Affirmative Reading, or The Lesson of the Chickadees Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. Dyonisia, 467 BC: The Mythology of Mourning Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
Part II. Cambridge, Massachusetts, circa 1837: The Science of Life Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
Part III. Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts, 1845: Epistemology of Change Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249
Part IV. Ossossané Village, Ontario, 1636: Acts of Recollecting Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	323
Appendix I: Freud and Benjamin on Nature in Mourning Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	369
Appendix II: On Thoreau’s Grave Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	385
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	389
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	443
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	447

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: General/trade;College/higher education;Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 450
Illustrations
- Other: 47 halftones, 2 line illustrations

eBook

Published: January 4, 2016
ISBN: 9780674495364