Description | Ovid’s Metamorphoses has informed several recent responses to the Anthropocene. Some see it as a source for images of human greed and arrogance; other have detected acknowledgements of the integration of human and more-than-human life in systems which could promote the flourishing of all life. The poem’s depiction of personhood and identity might seem resistant to such interpretations and consistent with a conception of personhood focused only on the human. Nonetheless, treatments of naming, of sensibility, and of relations of care between human and nonhuman animals in the Actaeon episode and elsewhere suggest a trans-species conception of personhood. When read in the light of Donna Haraway’s explorations of multispecies being, such features of the poem serve as an antidote to human arrogance. But they also warn against the (for Actaeon, catastrophic) consequences when we fail to respect the personhood of nonhuman beings. |
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