Interpreting Human Life through the Non-Human: Study of select works of Artists and Writers on Writing Life

Abstract

Human interpretation of life had become so anthropocentric by the end of modernism that an eco-centric interpretation of the same was inevitable which led to proliferating works of non-human narratives to understand human life. Artists and writers like Woolf, Gogh and Frost were philosophers who took to interpreting image of insects, each having different essences of its own. For example Van Gogh’s Giant Peacock Moth is part of the butterfly series and so the moth cannot be interpreted individually but as a collective dissection of the winged insects that wholly symbolize transformations of human beings. Whereas Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth philosophize the inevitability of life and death in which the moth acts as a tool to understand ontological significance of being a human. They are essentially writing about the significance of human life through the life of an insect but at the same time critically placing us into the crux of knowledge about human ontology that forms a design of life as Robert Frost writes in his poem Design. Their writing of life is the constant “deconstruction” or an influx of the socially constructed idea of the human and non-human; stepping beyond the margins of anthropocentricism.