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.