![]() ![]() ![]() The essay concludes with a consideration of the implications of such a fear for ecocriticism. ![]() What remains is an irresolvable fear regarding the uncertain borders between persons and environments. For Poe, the world can be made neither other nor mirror if our ontological separation from the universe is a fantasy, then so too is our enabling kinship with it. Little A thesis submitted to the faculty of Brigham Young University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Edward S. ![]() Poe’s texts thus foreclose both the idea that human selves are inherently distinct from or superior to their nonhuman environments and the seemingly antithetical (but actually coextensive) notion that we can self-constructively lose ourselves to the world. The Colloquy of Monos and Una and The Mystery of Marie Rogêt Jean A. Unlike his transcendentalist contemporaries and many current posthumanists, Poe represents the fusion of subjects and environments as a cataclysmic collapse, making the nonhuman environment the field against which discrete selves disappear as material bodies and as metaphysical entities. Extended readings of Henry David Thoreau (“Walking”), Edgar Allan Poe (“The Island of the Fay,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Colloquy of Monos and Una”) and recent posthumanist discourse illuminate these points. Taylor’s essay complicates Simon Estok’s analysis of ecophobia by illustrating, first, that fear of the natural world need not lead to its domination, and second, that ecophilia-ecophobia’s presumptive opposite-represents not a solution to this problem but an extension of the same logic under another name. ![]()
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