Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
‘Imagining Queer Ecologies’ BSLS Winter Symposium 2023, co-hosted by the British Society for Literature and Science and the University of Oxford, Oxford, İngiltere, 01 Aralık 2023
Keats’s poem “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” unsettles the assumed dominance of the Human or dispels the illusion of human/nonhuman categorical divide by foregrounding what is kept by the discourse of modernity in the background—the prelinguistic space of a grasshopper and a cricket singing in ecstasy of nature. By this poetic penetration into the pre-human depths of the grasshopper and the cricket termed as the naturalized others of modernity, Keats displaces the dominant discourse and asserts that although Humanism takes the Human as a reference point for the subject and overlooks the nonhuman imaginaries, there is also a pre-human/symbolic/linguistic space beyond the neat narratives on which the Human is modelled. As “powerful indicators of the decentering of anthropocentrism,” expressing “posthuman sensibilities and sexualities” (Braidotti, Nomadic Theory 105), these insects in the poem, the grasshopper and the cricket, throw the symbolic codes into question or overcome the metaphysics of presence by the alternative space that they weave by the sounds. The poem which will be discussed as the irruption of the semiotic into the symbolic reflects that no matter how much repressed and ignored as the naturalized others of the human subject, the pre-human is still there, lying beyond the grasp of language. This study consults Braidottian ideas of becoming-insect and Deleuzian concept of rhizo-musicology to discuss how the grasshopper and the cricket in the poem pose a threat to the Grand narratives of modernity by opening the doors to a presymbolic domain speaking unconsciously to human ears.