| Summary: | <i>Walden</i> queers its readers. While many have investigated Thoreaus queerness, there has been little notice of <i>Walden</i>s queerness. This project begins with a situational analysis that identifies the melancholic antecedents of <i>Walden</i> in Thoreaus life and his choices that led to the illumination of his melancholia. Thoreau had already been experimenting with what Branka Arsić identified as literalization. Nevertheless, a period of crisis, detailed by Robert Milder, made him aware of what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have referred to as the melancholics blind skill of demetaphorization. I suggest that Thoreau exploited this skill to produce <i>Walden</i>s unique ability to feed on and, as Henry Abelove and Henry Golemba have suggested, awaken its readers desires. I combine a close reading of <i>Walden</i> with selective study of the texts reception. <i>Walden</i> delivers on Thoreaus theory of friendship from his first book, <i>A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers</i>. <i>Walden</i>s friendship with its reader is the agency that accomplishes what Henry Golemba and Lawrence Buell have noted as a blurring of the boundary between reader and text. To investigate this friendship and <i>Walden</i>s accommodations of faux friendship, I construct a Burkean perspective by incongruity using research in the nature-writing and rhetoric disciplines that intersect with Thoreauvian studies. This incongruity is analyzed using not only Burkes theories of literary form and literature as equipment for living, but also Deleuzes process philosophy and Deleuze and Guattaris analyses of the war machine and their spatial analysis. This project complexifies Erin Rands research on polemics, using Deleuzes multiplicity not only to explain why polemics are unpredictable, but also to address what Sarah Hallenbeck has referred to as the crisis of agency. I suggest an expansion of José Esteban Muñozs research. The question of how one actually transitions from melancholia to disidentification cannot be adequately answered with terms like Stuart Halls oppositional reading or Deleuze and Guattaris de/reterritorialization. I also suggest that queer utopian thinking and poststructuralism are more compatible than previously argued. This dissertation is itself a polemic, straining the possibilities of friendship in the service of queerness.
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