Hearing Animals in Thoreau
765 views · Published 6 December 2013 · 31:05 · Indexed 17 October 2026
Channel: Chicago Humanities · 2013 · Education
Henry Thoreau's Walden is full of animal sounds: lowing cows, baying dogs, trumping frogs, hooting owls. Leading literary scholar and Yale University professor Wai Chee Dimock searches the great text of American Transcendentalism for these sonic traces. Her talk places Thoreau's animal sounds in a long cultural history reaching back to Aesop's fables and forward to such works as Maya Lin's What is Missing, a multimedia installation that uses the aesthetics of animal sounds to warn against the imminent extinction of species. This program is presented in partnership with The Newberry Library and the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago.
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