Document Type
Article
Abstract
In this essay, I explore some embodied bases of ethical attitudes toward human/ animal exchanges in the texts of three contemporary authors: Mary Oliver, Heller Levinson, and Adrienne Rich. Since other species share with humans varieties of agency, sentience, and purposive activity, I suggest that reciprocity is a fundamental aim in cross-species relations. Phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty depicts the correlation between embodied actions and attitudes, for example, between the hand movement of grasping and an appropriative attitude toward the natural world. His concept of reciprocity, grounded in the experience of one hand touching another, provides a reference for encounters that function reflexively, offering a re-acquaintance with the self as well as with the ecosystem. I augment this approach by discussing the attunement enfolded in our neural pathways as they develop during early environmental interactions. On the whole, these correspondences are layered over with verbal structures, conceptual knowledge divorced from feeling and sensation, and accommodations to life in a culturally and technologically mediated society. The direct and imaginal encounters described by the three authors indicate how relations with non-human nature can reinvigorate our underlying environmental attunement. In moments when we experience a correspondence with the world around us that exceeds our customary categories, we are available for exploring reciprocal relations.
Repository Citation
Newell, Mary. "Gestures toward Cross-Species Reciprocal Relations in Contemporary Poetics." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 2, 2007, pp. 1–19. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss2/7
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