earticle

영어

This paper examines John Clare’s nature poems to explore how Clare, being immersed in nature, develops affectionate bonds with nature and how he makes physical and mental modifications to botanical affect—the vital force transmitting from the bodies of plants into the body and mind of the interactive agent. Clare’s botanical aesthetics enables him to project feeling and thinking onto the vegetal bodies and to transform himself into a non-human being during the process of vegetal empathy. This particular emotional state or “affect” demolishes barriers between men and nature, allowing the human to enter into the world of the non-human. Affect is intensified vital force that modifies both mind and body, and that allows Clare’s readers to become immersed in the natural world as a co-equal part of nature. This paper draws upon the perspectives of affect theory to illuminate Clare’s botanical aesthetics in terms of affect as intensive force, affect-induced vegetal empathy, and botanical atmosphere emanating from the affective qualities of the environment. Understanding Clare’s botanical poetry from the perspectives of embodied theories of affect testifies that people’s affections for botanical world are intersubjective, rather than being mysterious private personal feelings.