(6).
However, this prominent mapping of the empirical, ecological Thoreau by way of sharp, fixed distinctions with the transcendental, tropological Emerson is not without its problems or its critics. David Robinson, for one, exploring Thoreau's "worldly transcendentalism," pursues a similar interest in the emergence of Thoreau's empiricism in the 1850s, but cautions against reading his ecological immersion in natural history after Walden as necessarily divorced from the poetics of "Emersonian idealism" evident in Thoreau's own earlier work: "Over the last decade of his life, Thoreau devised a set of interlinking projects in which empirical observation and metaphysical conceptualization played vital and complementary roles." (7) In this essay, I heed Robinson's caution, concerned that the various dichotomies that have come to organize critical conceptions of Thoreau in contradistinction to Emerson--the empirically or ecologically concrete vs. the imaginatively or rhetorically abstract, the literal world vs. the figural word--reduce a complexity that obtains in the contexts and concepts with which both Thoreau and Emerson think and write nature. As I see it, this reduction stems from a problematic literalism that some ecocritics have brought into their reading of Thoreau's opposition to Emerson. The underlying problem concerns a misleading division drawn between the literal (understood as some physical, and thereby authentic, form of the natural world) and the literate or literary (understood as some expression of language or imagination).
Lance Newman founds his reading of Thoreau upon an ecocriticism that emphasizes as "the central axiom in its critical theory" a "direct contradiction" of the claims of "poststructuralist" theories reducing the world to language. "Ecocriticism responds," Newman argues, "by insisting on the independent reality of the nonlinguistic material world.
