Locating the Animal in Emily Dickinson’s Poem “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22147332 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Adrian Trojak (0009-0006-3549-2895, University of Gdańsk, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Pages | 1-13 |
| Publication date | 2025-12-17 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Zoophilologica (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2451-3849 • E-ISSN: 2719-2687 |
| Publisher | University of Silesia in Katowice (PUBLISHER • PL) |
| DOI | 10.31261/zoophilologica.2025.16.11 |
| OpenAlex | W4417434209 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
The article explores the problem of poetically presenting animality without reinforcing the conventional human/animal distinction. The article argues that the poem addresses the issue of locating animality within Homo sapiens by its poetic rendering of an interaction between a dying human and an insect. The insect’s presence makes the vision of immortality inaccessible to the lyrical speaker. Locating animality is achieved by undermining heroic narratives, which leads to a fuller revelation of the human’s finitude. The animal within the human being turns out to be located in their finitude determined by the mortal biological constitution and embeddedness in a semiotic system
Human animal · Immortality · Poetry · Posthuman · Revelation · Semiotics · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Poetry Analysis and Criticism
| Highly cited | No |
|---|