Skip to main content

James P Warren

Washington and Lee University, English, Emeritus

Followers

86

Following

2

Mentions

8

Public Views

S. Blount Mason, Jr. Professor of English emeritus, with 34 years of teaching at Washington and Lee University, now guiding visitors to Denali National Park in Alaska.Current research focuses on writers Barry Lopez, Robert Macfarlane, Henry David Thoreau.
Phone: 907-888-2489
Address: 1500 Vista Hermosa Road
Jemez Pueblo, NM 87024

less

Kansas State University

Griffith University

Aimee Swenson Buckley

Michigan State University

Academia Sinica

John Levi Barnard

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of Winnipeg

David W Jardine

University of Calgary

University of Massachusetts, Boston

University of East London

Gwen Robbins Schug

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Interests

Uploads

Papers by James P Warren

Gerhardt, Christine, A Place for Humility: Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Apr 14, 2015

Simon Willem Bijl, Erasmus in het Nederlands tot 1617, Nieuwkoop, B. de Graaf, 1978. 441 pages, 21 illustrations, 85 florins

Moreana, 1980

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics [review]

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 2005

In this timely, elegant addition to the Iowa Whitman Series, Jimmie Killingsworth merges his deep... more In this timely, elegant addition to the Iowa Whitman Series, Jimmie Killingsworth merges his deep knowledge of Whitman's poetry and environ-mental rhetoric to give "a reconsideration of Whitman's language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and a reconsideration of ...

This gives the slides for the talk delivered in May 2018 at the Thoreau conference in Gothenburg,... more

PLANT-THINKING IN THOREAU

This is the text of the paper delivered in Gothenburg in May 2018. The paper discusses Michael M... more

"Carrying the Stories Home": Barry Lopez's Horizon

ISLE, 2020

Essay on Barry Lopez's recent book, with a focus on wild animals and how they appear in the body ... more

Wolverine in the Archives

In June 2012, I spent a week on Davidson Glacier, above Haines, Alaska. Seven of us formed two ro... more In June 2012, I spent a week on Davidson Glacier, above Haines, Alaska. Seven of us formed two rope teams of climbers, learning how to travel safely across a big river of ice. Every morning for seven days, we roped up and snowshoed across the glacier, then strapped on crampons and climbed up unnamed peaks of the Chilkat Range. Late every afternoon, we would trudge back to camp across the glacier, barely lifting our feet and listening to the shuffle of the snowshoes. The sun stayed out most of the night, but it didn't stop us from sleeping soundly.

Other Country: Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists

Flyer for 20% discount on this book, December 2015 from University of Arizona Press

Wolverine in the Archives

Essay on Barry Lopez, the figure of the wolverine, and the Lopez Papers in the Sowell Collection ... more

Placing John Haines

A presentation at the beginning of a book project by the same name. The book was published in 20... more

Drafts by James P Warren

Chapter 6: "Dispersion of Seeds" and the Writer's Faith

This chapter focuses on "Succession of Forest Trees," "Dispersion of Seeds," and the Journal, esp... more

Chapter 1: Thoreau's Botanical Turn and the 1851 Journal

Critical Plant Studies Over the past thirty years, students of critical animal studies have devel... more Critical Plant Studies Over the past thirty years, students of critical animal studies have developed new ways of discussing the relationships between the human and more-than-human world. More recently, the interdisciplinary wave has emerged in critical plant studies. The philosopher Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia UP, 2013) is a seminal text in the field, and Marder is editing a new series of interdisciplinary publications called Critical Plant Studies. In addition to philosophical and literary studies, such recent popular works as Richard Powers's The Overstory (2018) and David George Haskell's The Song of Trees (2017) attest to the power of new approaches to plants. These works are bringing the whole question of our relationship to plants to a new tipping point.1 Michael Marder defines "plant-thinking" in four ways: (1) "the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants" (10); (2) human thinking about plants; (3) how human thinking is altered by its encounter with the vegetal world, becoming less human and more plant-like; (4) "the ongoing symbiotic relation between this transfigured thinking and the existence of plants" (10). In the combination of these four senses, "plant-thinking" is above all an encounter with the vegetal other. As a sequence, the four definitions create an implicit narrative of contact, intersection, and transformation. By taking account of the mode of thinking proper to plants, and then by altering our thinking to bring it more in accord with that mode of thinking, we humans can create the ongoing symbiotic relationship with plants that will transfigure both our lives and futures on the planet.

SIXTY EXCURSIONS AND THOREAU'S JOURNAL

The coronavirus pandemic seemed to throw everyone off their path, but by the time spring arrived,... more The coronavirus pandemic seemed to throw everyone off their path, but by the time spring arrived, I had begun two projects that moved along similar paths and gradually opened in directions I had never anticipated. One was reading and studying Thoreau's Journal, focusing on his studies in botany. The other was hiking in the Valles Caldera National Preserve, twenty miles north of our new home in northern New Mexico. The two paths weren't exactly parallel. Readers of the Journal know that Thoreau was a committed and disciplined traveler, rambling over the neighborhood of Concord several times a week, in daylight and moonlight, by foot, by boat, and by skates. As he comments in the 4 December 1856 Journal entry, he found himself "observing when plants first blossomed and leafed, and I followed it up early and late, far and near, several years in succession, running to different sides of the town and into the neighboring towns, often between twenty and thirty miles in a day. I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened, beside attending to a great many others in different directions and some of them equally distant, at the same time. At the same time I had an eye for birds and whatever else might offer" (Journal IX: 158). The Journal from 1850 to 1861 abundantly shows that Thoreau went "running" all over in search of flowering plants, sometimes in company with Ellery Channing, but most often alone. He called these travels "excursions," and I have come to think of them as botanical excursions. In my reading, that is, plants dominate Thoreau's journal entries, and the plants often lead him to larger reflections on science, literature, and writing.

Chapter 4: WALDEN as Botanical Excursion

This fourth chapter of THOREAU'S BOTANY asks how plants and plant-thinking function in WALDEN. By... more This fourth chapter of THOREAU'S BOTANY asks how plants and plant-thinking function in WALDEN. By examining Journal sources for several key passages in which plants appear, I argue that the role of botany in Thoreau's masterpiece is vital. Key passages are "The Bean-Field" and the sand foliage passage in "Spring."

Chapter 3: CAPE COD and the Seventh Excursion

A reading of Cape Cod (1865), Thoreau's third posthumous book publication edited by Sophia Thorea... more

THOREAU'S BOTANY

September 2020 abstract of a book project.

Chapter 1: Thoreau's Botanical Turn

Critical Plant Studies Over the past thirty years, students of critical animal studies have devel... more Critical Plant Studies Over the past thirty years, students of critical animal studies have developed new ways of discussing the relationships between the human and more-than-human world. More recently, the interdisciplinary wave has emerged in critical plant studies. The philosopher Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia UP, 2013) is a seminal text in the field, and Marder is editing a new series of interdisciplinary publications called Critical Plant Studies. In addition to philosophical and literary studies, such recent popular works as Richard Powers's The Overstory (2018) and David George Haskell's The Song of Trees (2017) attest to the power of new approaches to plants. These works are bringing the whole question of our relationship to plants to a new tipping point.1 Michael Marder defines "plant-thinking" in four ways: (1) "the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants" (10); (2) human thinking about plants; (3) how human thinking is altered by its encounter with the vegetal world, becoming less human and more plant-like; (4) "the ongoing symbiotic relation between this transfigured thinking and the existence of plants" (10). In the combination of these four senses, "plant-thinking" is above all an encounter with the vegetal other. As a sequence, the four definitions create an implicit narrative of contact, intersection, and transformation. By taking account of the mode of thinking proper to plants, and then by altering our thinking to bring it more in accord with that mode of thinking, we humans can create the ongoing symbiotic relationship with plants that will transfigure both our lives and futures on the planet.

Chapter 2: The Maine Woods & Ways of Knowing

Revised and updated version of this chapter, with more attention to Thoreau's racism and the role... more

Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane

This essay will appear in ASSAY in Fall 2020. This version is substantially different from the es... more

Walking Into the Mountain

The relationship between Robert Macfarlane and Nan Shepherd, explored principally through a readi... more

Gerhardt, Christine, A Place for Humility: Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Apr 14, 2015

Simon Willem Bijl, Erasmus in het Nederlands tot 1617, Nieuwkoop, B. de Graaf, 1978. 441 pages, 21 illustrations, 85 florins

Moreana, 1980

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics [review]

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 2005

In this timely, elegant addition to the Iowa Whitman Series, Jimmie Killingsworth merges his deep... more In this timely, elegant addition to the Iowa Whitman Series, Jimmie Killingsworth merges his deep knowledge of Whitman's poetry and environ-mental rhetoric to give "a reconsideration of Whitman's language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and a reconsideration of ...

This gives the slides for the talk delivered in May 2018 at the Thoreau conference in Gothenburg,... more

PLANT-THINKING IN THOREAU

This is the text of the paper delivered in Gothenburg in May 2018. The paper discusses Michael M... more

"Carrying the Stories Home": Barry Lopez's Horizon

ISLE, 2020

Essay on Barry Lopez's recent book, with a focus on wild animals and how they appear in the body ... more

Wolverine in the Archives

In June 2012, I spent a week on Davidson Glacier, above Haines, Alaska. Seven of us formed two ro... more In June 2012, I spent a week on Davidson Glacier, above Haines, Alaska. Seven of us formed two rope teams of climbers, learning how to travel safely across a big river of ice. Every morning for seven days, we roped up and snowshoed across the glacier, then strapped on crampons and climbed up unnamed peaks of the Chilkat Range. Late every afternoon, we would trudge back to camp across the glacier, barely lifting our feet and listening to the shuffle of the snowshoes. The sun stayed out most of the night, but it didn't stop us from sleeping soundly.

Other Country: Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists

Flyer for 20% discount on this book, December 2015 from University of Arizona Press

Wolverine in the Archives

Essay on Barry Lopez, the figure of the wolverine, and the Lopez Papers in the Sowell Collection ... more

Placing John Haines

A presentation at the beginning of a book project by the same name. The book was published in 20... more

Chapter 6: "Dispersion of Seeds" and the Writer's Faith

This chapter focuses on "Succession of Forest Trees," "Dispersion of Seeds," and the Journal, esp... more

Chapter 1: Thoreau's Botanical Turn and the 1851 Journal

Critical Plant Studies Over the past thirty years, students of critical animal studies have devel... more Critical Plant Studies Over the past thirty years, students of critical animal studies have developed new ways of discussing the relationships between the human and more-than-human world. More recently, the interdisciplinary wave has emerged in critical plant studies. The philosopher Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia UP, 2013) is a seminal text in the field, and Marder is editing a new series of interdisciplinary publications called Critical Plant Studies. In addition to philosophical and literary studies, such recent popular works as Richard Powers's The Overstory (2018) and David George Haskell's The Song of Trees (2017) attest to the power of new approaches to plants. These works are bringing the whole question of our relationship to plants to a new tipping point.1 Michael Marder defines "plant-thinking" in four ways: (1) "the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants" (10); (2) human thinking about plants; (3) how human thinking is altered by its encounter with the vegetal world, becoming less human and more plant-like; (4) "the ongoing symbiotic relation between this transfigured thinking and the existence of plants" (10). In the combination of these four senses, "plant-thinking" is above all an encounter with the vegetal other. As a sequence, the four definitions create an implicit narrative of contact, intersection, and transformation. By taking account of the mode of thinking proper to plants, and then by altering our thinking to bring it more in accord with that mode of thinking, we humans can create the ongoing symbiotic relationship with plants that will transfigure both our lives and futures on the planet.

SIXTY EXCURSIONS AND THOREAU'S JOURNAL

The coronavirus pandemic seemed to throw everyone off their path, but by the time spring arrived,... more The coronavirus pandemic seemed to throw everyone off their path, but by the time spring arrived, I had begun two projects that moved along similar paths and gradually opened in directions I had never anticipated. One was reading and studying Thoreau's Journal, focusing on his studies in botany. The other was hiking in the Valles Caldera National Preserve, twenty miles north of our new home in northern New Mexico. The two paths weren't exactly parallel. Readers of the Journal know that Thoreau was a committed and disciplined traveler, rambling over the neighborhood of Concord several times a week, in daylight and moonlight, by foot, by boat, and by skates. As he comments in the 4 December 1856 Journal entry, he found himself "observing when plants first blossomed and leafed, and I followed it up early and late, far and near, several years in succession, running to different sides of the town and into the neighboring towns, often between twenty and thirty miles in a day. I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened, beside attending to a great many others in different directions and some of them equally distant, at the same time. At the same time I had an eye for birds and whatever else might offer" (Journal IX: 158). The Journal from 1850 to 1861 abundantly shows that Thoreau went "running" all over in search of flowering plants, sometimes in company with Ellery Channing, but most often alone. He called these travels "excursions," and I have come to think of them as botanical excursions. In my reading, that is, plants dominate Thoreau's journal entries, and the plants often lead him to larger reflections on science, literature, and writing.

Chapter 4: WALDEN as Botanical Excursion

This fourth chapter of THOREAU'S BOTANY asks how plants and plant-thinking function in WALDEN. By... more This fourth chapter of THOREAU'S BOTANY asks how plants and plant-thinking function in WALDEN. By examining Journal sources for several key passages in which plants appear, I argue that the role of botany in Thoreau's masterpiece is vital. Key passages are "The Bean-Field" and the sand foliage passage in "Spring."

Chapter 3: CAPE COD and the Seventh Excursion

A reading of Cape Cod (1865), Thoreau's third posthumous book publication edited by Sophia Thorea... more

THOREAU'S BOTANY

September 2020 abstract of a book project.

Chapter 1: Thoreau's Botanical Turn

Critical Plant Studies Over the past thirty years, students of critical animal studies have devel... more Critical Plant Studies Over the past thirty years, students of critical animal studies have developed new ways of discussing the relationships between the human and more-than-human world. More recently, the interdisciplinary wave has emerged in critical plant studies. The philosopher Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia UP, 2013) is a seminal text in the field, and Marder is editing a new series of interdisciplinary publications called Critical Plant Studies. In addition to philosophical and literary studies, such recent popular works as Richard Powers's The Overstory (2018) and David George Haskell's The Song of Trees (2017) attest to the power of new approaches to plants. These works are bringing the whole question of our relationship to plants to a new tipping point.1 Michael Marder defines "plant-thinking" in four ways: (1) "the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants" (10); (2) human thinking about plants; (3) how human thinking is altered by its encounter with the vegetal world, becoming less human and more plant-like; (4) "the ongoing symbiotic relation between this transfigured thinking and the existence of plants" (10). In the combination of these four senses, "plant-thinking" is above all an encounter with the vegetal other. As a sequence, the four definitions create an implicit narrative of contact, intersection, and transformation. By taking account of the mode of thinking proper to plants, and then by altering our thinking to bring it more in accord with that mode of thinking, we humans can create the ongoing symbiotic relationship with plants that will transfigure both our lives and futures on the planet.

Chapter 2: The Maine Woods & Ways of Knowing

Revised and updated version of this chapter, with more attention to Thoreau's racism and the role... more

Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane

This essay will appear in ASSAY in Fall 2020. This version is substantially different from the es... more

Walking Into the Mountain

The relationship between Robert Macfarlane and Nan Shepherd, explored principally through a readi... more