Analogical Approaches to Biosemiotic Criticism

Abstract

In this chapter, I will explore what Timo Maran calls “Analogical Approaches to Biosemiotic Criticism.” I study the extent to which nature is always already a meaning-making, agentive, ironic, and signing process by looking at (1) the linguistic and artistic modeling of predator-prey relationships in medieval English lyric poetry and how these predator-prey relationships may be understood as scaffolding the emergence of significant figural, narrative, and even ethical dimensions of human culture; (2) how Milton’s linguistic and artistic modeling of the ecology of his Mount of Purgatory and Garden of Paradise (in Paradise Lost) both reveal and mask the agency of the signing action of nature and, not coincidentally, of other religious systems of belief; (3) how the linguistic and artistic modeling of the poetry of John Clare, when held up to that of Milton, helps readers to recover the suppressed (within Milton’s Paradise Lost) agency of natural communities, to be suspicious of models of evolution based on so-called “progress” (see how, for von Uexküll, “meaning” replaces “progress” as a dominant ideology in evolution) and, by analogy, to help readers appreciate the ecological and sustainable interpretive power of the Midrash and Talmud, a power erased by the hyphen of the phrase Judaeo-Christian and by Milton’s ecological architecture in Paradise Lost); (4) how, that is, spaces, places, and texts are all equally (analogously) interpretive systems; and, (5) how Richard Power’s The Overstory models how phytosemiosis, zoosemiosis, anthroposemiosis, and even autonomosemiosis (the signing actions of autonomous digital avatars) are scaffolded upon, are analogous in structure and function to, each other.