(National Taiwan University) 5/9 NTU DFLL Faculty Colloquium 

NTU DFLL Faculty Colloquium
Title: Emily Dickinson’s Environmental Gothicism
Speaker: Prof. Li-hsin Hsu (National Chengchi University)
Moderator: Prof. Lilith Acadia (National Taiwan University)
Time: 15:30~17:00, Thursday, May 9, 2024
Venue: 1F DFLL Conference Room, Gallery of University History, NTU

Abstract: The talk looks at Emily Dickinson’s poetry about the nonhuman world, in particular relation to EcoGothic and Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology, rethinking the role fear plays in her poems about Nature, and how ecological awareness in Dickinson resonates with what Morton calls “ecognosis” — a riddle-like, serpentine form of ecological knowledge that sees dark thought as a necessary path to lead one to a deeper level of ecological understanding (from dark-depressing and dark-uncanny to dark-sweet). By exploring fear as an essential part of one’s ecological relations in Dickinson, and her conceptual resonance with Morton, the essay highlights the dark ecological epistemology in Dickinson in her attempt to assess an alternative, potentially more sustainable mode of ecological thinking, with a shifting aesthetics from a gothicized sense of human-nonhuman alienation towards an eco-poetics of human-nonhuman co-strangeness, and an ecognostic understanding of multi-species co-existence.

Bio: Li-Hsin Hsu is Professor and Chair of English at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Her research interests include Emily Dickinson studies, Romanticism, Ecocriticism, and Modern Taiwan Poetry. She serves on the Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) board and will host the EDIS international conference in Taiwan in 2025 on Dickinson and Ecologies. She is also currently the organizer of the “Taiwan in the Anthropocene II” research group, sponsored by the National Science and Technology Council in Taiwan.

Chi-ming Hung
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
National Taiwan University
Tel: 02 3366 3208
Email: qiming1234@ntu.edu.tw