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Full-Text Articles in Philosophy of Language
The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer
The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer
English Theses and Dissertations
The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …
A Bad Time To Name Your Pet: Pet Names In The Age Of Witches, Evan Velez
A Bad Time To Name Your Pet: Pet Names In The Age Of Witches, Evan Velez
Emerging Writers
In early America, there were many strange superstitions about witches. Colonists looked for all sorts of forms of witchcraft “evidence”. According to The Penguin Book of Witches, the nature of pet names may have served as an unconscious form of evidence (Howe 239). While the author thought of this suggestion as a form of social logic, this essay investigates it as a phenomenon of language. Pet names had a key role in influencing negative feelings towards animals labeled as “familiars.” This affected colonists’ perceptions of an animal, and resulted in the familiar eventually becoming a hated “pet.”