Melancholia as an Ecological Entente: Tracing the Ecocritical Significance of the Melancholic Poet Persona in Margaret Atwood’s Dearly
Melancholia as an Ecological Entente: Tracing the Ecocritical Significance of the Melancholic Poet Persona in Margaret Atwood’s Dearly

Summary/Abstract: With a close reading of Margaret Atwood’s collection of poems Dearly, the paper aims atan alternative understanding of Freudian Melancholia to discuss its creative and fecundpotential rather than seeing it as a repressive force, with a focus on its role in expeditingecological sociality. I will explore how the literary depiction of a Melancholic reaction toloss, especially in terms of the ego-loss, catalyzes an ontological and political miscegena-tion that helps build multispecies communities based on a shared feeling of emotionaldistress by subverting the savior-saved or subject-object binary vis-à-vis humans andmore-than-humans.

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