A Study on Creation Principles of Five-storied Pagoda: From the Perspective of Eco-aesthetics

The novel-Five-storied Pagoda-written by Japanese novelist Koda Rohan manifestly presents ecological consciousness from the perspective of the natural principle, the holistic principle, and the harmonious principle, which are the three principles of ecological aesthetics. By perceiving the harmonious atmosphere among man and nature, individuals themselves, individuals, and society in texts, we can learn that Koda Rohan insisted on traditional Japanese aesthetics and prospectively reflected on the modern aesthetic ideology of Japanese society after Meiji Restoration. This paper explores the aesthetic features of—Five-storied Pagoda—by analyzing text expression from a new angle, and probes into the relationship with the three principles of eco-aesthetics. It is aimed to determine the consensus between eastern aesthetics and ecological aesthetics, and it can be inferred that the consensus will, to a great extent, make a special contribution to enriching the construction of ecological aesthetics.

Ecological Aesthetics of Intimate Otherness in Swedish Trans Cinema

This article is an exploration of trans and non-binary representation in independent Swedish film productions. Two award-winning films, Pojktanten (She Male Snails, 2012) and Nånting måste gå sönder (Something Must Break, 2014), created by director Ester Martin Bergsmark (in collaboration with author Eli Levén), will be in focus and discussed through their ecological aesthetics that build on what I call intimate otherness. The two films represent not only a significant debut moment for Swedish trans cinema, but also offer a radical engagement with nature and the unnatural. While Bergsmark’s films incite a vivid aestheticisation of environmental pollution, ranging from items of garbage in the forest to untidyrooms, unwashed clothes, and dirty bathing water, the films’ ecological aesthetics, as I argue, imagine an enchanted space in which the trans body emerges as livable. Historically reduced to an “unnatural” and “contaminated” embodiment, trans bodies in the films form an intimate otherness with non-human objects and landscapes at the urban peripheries, at the margins of normativity and productivity. The films’ ecological aesthetics shift gender non-conformity from “unnatural” into a possibility. These aesthetics, I suggest, unfold into a gender-dissident´ landscape of rebellious and poetic, intimate otherness.

Modern Western Ecological Aesthetics from the Perspective of Aesthetics

Aesthetics is the study of people's perception and experience of heaven, earth and man and all things. Environment and landscape are the most important perceptual manifestation of ecosystem. How this perceptual manifestation affects human mind needs to be answered by aesthetics. It is not only possible but also necessary to study ecosystem from the perspective of aesthetics. Taking the ecological aesthetics of the English world as the main research object, this paper studies the three main approaches to the construction of western ecological aesthetics, which are philosophical speculation, ecological art theory and environmental practice. This study shows that: the interaction between ecological aesthetics and ecological art makes ecological aesthetics become the universal aesthetics of all aesthetic objects (including environment and Art), so as to distinguish it from environmental aesthetics more clearly. Strengthening the interaction between aesthetics and ecological aesthetic experience can make the connotation of ecological aesthetics more profound and clear. The results of this study have a certain reference value for the study of modern western ecological aesthetics from the perspective of aesthetics.

Solar Reflections: On the Sun Mirror in Rjukan

The Sun Mirror (2013) by Martin Andersen is a mirror machine placed upon a mountain top. It reflects sunlight down to the town square in Rjukan, a small Norwegian town that is located in the shade for almost six months each year. Based on a century-old idea, the mirror realised the dream of Rjukan’s inhabitants to see the sun in wintertime. What makes the idea of a man-made sun mirror still relevant in the 21st Century, 100 years after its first mention in the heyday of the Second Industrial Revolution? This chapter contextualises the Sun Mirror by discussing ecological aesthetics and argues that despite its technological structure, the mirror opposes treating nature as a recourse for human exploitation. Rather it makes visible the properties of the sun (the sun’s temporality and rhythm) and promotes the sun in itself as life-giving and vital for us humans.

Xenoflesh

This essay explores three recent celebrated novels that are concerned with the consumption of meat: Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat, J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. The essay develops the critical terms xenoflesh, zoē poetics, and carnojectivity in order to further understanding of these novels and their wider bearing on human-animal relations. Building from the classical distinction between bios and zoē (political and “bare life”) described by Giorgio Agamben, this essay theorizes an occluded flesh that is violently excluded from discourse: xenoflesh. Industrial farming and its product, meat, is one of the most fundamental ways of enforcing this division of the flesh across modernity. As my essay explores, D’Lacey’s, Coetzee’s, and Han’s novels forge a new zoē poetics: an ethical, speculative, and ecological aesthetics that investigates how the meat is one of the most deeply inscribed modes of silencing the uncanny call of xenoflesh.