Inserting a nineteent century thinker into the intellectual debates of
the late twentieth century, Jane Bennett enters Thoreau into a series of
dialogues with recent contemporary thinkers: Foucault on the question of
identity and power; Donna Haraway on nature and culture; Hollywood
celebrities on the Walden Woods project on the environment; the National
Endowment for the Humanities and others regarding the relation between
politics and arts; and Kafka on the question of political idealism.
Bennett suggests that many dimensions of Thoreau′s thought exhibit a
′postmodern sensibility′ that crosses into the late twentieth century.