Ecopoetics and ‘the Bestial’: Negotiating Human Dignity in Two Contemporary Short Stories from Singapore and Malaysia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Humans often revel in their self-proclaimed ability to identify interactive possibilities between people and their environment despite common knowledge that Nature does not need humans but humans need Nature. There are significant instances of writing about humankind’s relationship with Nature, and the scientific as well as spiritual potential of this relationship that may eventually lead to a sustainable Earth. Correspondingly, creative writing is also increasingly preoccupied with mimicking ecological processes that sustain Earth. Jonathan Skinner has noted “how certain poetic methods model ecological processes like complexity, non-linearity, feedback loops and recycling.” Since its coinage, ecopoetics is a much contested term in contemporary literary theory, and has been subjected to multiple definitions. While the basis of an ecopoetic understanding of Earth centres on its scepticism about human exceptionalism, hyperrationality and consumerism, it has almost always been applied to poetry. In this paper, I view “green discourse” in fiction through the ecopoetic lens, and read representations of how human and non-human forms fail to interlock in two contemporary Southeast Asian short stories. I explore whether human dignity can be salvaged from the debris of anonymity conditioned by an anthropocentric perception of existence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".