This article centers around the works of the leading Irish poet Michael Longley (1939-2025) and examines the complex interplay between his deathscape and sustained attention to vegetal life. Drawing on critical plant studies, particularly Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, this essay argues that Longley's contemplation, imagination, and representation of death are deeply shaped by his ongoing engagement with plant life. Rather than serving merely as a convenient metaphor or a passive backdrop, the vegetal world in Longley's poetry fosters a kind of vegetal poetics that emphasizes vegetal alterity, non-identical thinking, and human-plant enanglement. In Longley's works, plant life emerges as an active and creative participant in the deathscape, prompting a rethinking of the relationship between self, place, and environment both within the Northern Irish context and beyond.
This article examines how the transmedial synergy between verbal and visual forms reshaped aesthetic perception and cultural recognition in the early twentieth century, focusing on the non-literary elements in modernist poetries of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Both poets, associated with avant-garde movements, developed a self-awareness of the symbiotic relation between poetry and painting in their transmedial creations. For instance, Williams's ekphrastic references to classical artworks and his collaboration with contemporaneous painters, along with Stevens's philosophical reflections on a unified theory of art grounded in abstraction. By proposing the concept of modernist aesthetics of transmediality, this study critically investigates how their interartistic approaches challenge the longstanding debate between poesis and pictura at the peak of the Lessingian dichotomy. Furthermore, the article explores how verbal designs and compositions, enshrouded within visual culture and mass media, offer radical artifice for new strain of expression, mediation, and re-presentation that refract the medial complexities of modernity.
Hari Kunzru's Transmission (2004) interrogates cosmopolitan ideals so often celebrated in the contemporary information age. Eschewing both digital utopianism-the belief in seamless global connection-and outright pessimism grounded in inequality, the novel instead exposes the structural instabilities and systemic risks embedded in the information society. Transmission enriches our understanding of risk and cosmopolitanism by emphasizing the generative potential of risk rather than framing risk solely as a threat. The novel advances the notion of "enforced cosmopolitanism": an externally compelled yet potentially transformative solidarity forged in moments of crisis. Drawing on theories of risk and cosmopolitanism, this paper examines three intersecting risks: the subversive agency of digital laborers, the vulnerability of elites' information enclosures, and the runaway Leela virus that unravels global networks. Transmission re-frames cosmopolitanism as an outcome of systemic instability, suggesting that coercive encounters can give rise to voluntary cooperation and shared responsibility once control gives way to risk.
The Book of Form and Emptiness constructs a hallucinatory auditory world, triggered by a traumatic event of a family member's death. Drawing on phenomenological paradigms and psychopathology, further deepened by Ruth Ozeki's grounding in S & omacr;t & omacr; Zen Buddhism, this article analyzes the intentional structure of the protagonist Benny Oh's hallucinatory experience by examining the dynamic between the subject that perceives and the objects that are perceived, as revealed in his gradual shift from resisting to embracing auditory hallucinations. This analysis argues that the subjective link between embodied vulnerability and the belief in pain informs one's understanding of impermanence, and, thus, subjectivity and the world. Under this circumstance, Ozeki reconstructs subjectivity through compassionate intersubjective relations, while challenging the epistemological dominance of neoliberal rationality about mental illness.
The tension between the first and the second cats in Poe's "The Black Cat" dramatizes a shift from anthropocentrism to posthumanism. From an anthropocentric perspective, the first black cat provides an educational tool to cultivate kindness in the narrator and then is a target of sport to please the moody narrator. This paradoxical practice of loving and abusing animals in antebellum America conceals an anthropocentric concern: the storyteller has grown up with pets and formed a co-constitutive subjectivity, but he must draw a boundary to demarcate humans and animals. This boundary sanctions his privilege to decide the life and death of the first cat and to dictate its story. However, the second cat refuses to be plotted into the human narration, and creates a narrative disruption, thus declaring its animal agency. The second cat also practices dynamic concealment and outwits the narrator in a game of hide-and-seek. Furthermore, the second cat frees itself from entombment within a wall and sends the narrator to incarceration by the walls of a prison. The radical denouement of reversing species roles, in combination with the enigmatic beginning, concretizes the difficulty of affirming animal agency in the anthropocentric nineteenth century.
