Abstract:

The human mind has limited ability to embrace the meaning of ecosystemic vulnerability, but immense capacity to appreciate the frailty of individual nonhuman organisms, which exhibit precarity akin to our own. Even inhumanly strong and durable natural beings—such as whales, primates, and redwood trees—are legible to us as fellow “vulnerables,” individual, mortal, and representative of species susceptible to suffering, population decline, and/or possibly even extinction. Such psychological tendencies as speculative empathy, empathetic self-projection and self-erasure, and metaphorical emulation are aspects of what social scientists and communication scholars have dubbed “the arithmetic of compassion.” This lecture will explore these tendencies in such literary works as Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm (1977), Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall’s Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People (1993), Julia Butterfly Hill’s The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods (2000), Marybeth Holleman’s “How to Grieve a Glacier” (2018), Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), and Amy Donovan’s “Raw, Dense, and Loud: A Whale’s Perspective on Cold Water Energy” (2022). What’s at stake in our potential to grasp the vulnerability of the other, with the aid of sophisticated literary communication strategies, includes the possibility that we might glimpse our own potential oblivion on the horizon before it’s too late to choose a different path.

主辦單位：中華民國英美文學學會、淡江大學英文系、陽明交通大學醫療人文跨領域研究中心

補助單位：國科會