Walls Laura Dassow
Department of English Language and Literatures, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina 29208, USA.
Isis. 2010 Sep;101(3):590-8. doi: 10.1086/655796.
While literary works are often treated as museum pieces, an alternative Romantic/ Pragmatic aesthetic emphasizes instead the rootedness of all texts in lived experience. This suggests that both literary and scientific texts may be approached as performances that weave together discursive and material elements, giving language to matter, both making, and becoming, "things that talk." Three authors are contrasted: Emerson uses natural objects as metaphors to complete his thought; Thoreau uses natural objects as mediators who enroll him to speak for them in the name of a wider ecology; Humboldt attempts to enroll nonhumans, namely cannibals, into the global civil community by asking them to speak for themselves. The resulting quandary unsettles the Cartesian boundary between human and nonhuman, subject and object; as scholars divided by this boundary, we must multiply our own relations, the better to understand the ties that bind us into the common project of building the Cosmos.
虽然文学作品常常被当作博物馆藏品来对待，但一种与之不同的浪漫主义/实用主义美学却强调，所有文本都扎根于生活体验。这意味着，文学文本和科学文本都可以被视为将话语元素和物质元素交织在一起的表演，赋予物质以语言，使其既成为又变成“会说话的事物”。文中对比了三位作者：爱默生将自然物体用作隐喻来完善自己的思想；梭罗将自然物体用作媒介，这些媒介促使他以更广泛的生态之名替它们发声；洪堡试图让非人类，即食人族，通过让他们为自己发声而加入全球文明社群。由此产生的困境打破了笛卡尔式的人与非人、主体与客体之间的界限；作为被这条界限分隔开来的学者，我们必须增加自身的联系，以便更好地理解将我们联结在构建宇宙这一共同事业中的纽带。
