“Nonhuman narrative” can mean several things: stories with a physical setting devoid of humans; stories about artificial intelligence, robots, animals with humanlike qualities, and so on; it can also encompass otherwise lifeless, non-sentient beings with such qualities. This presentation, which examines the work of the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz (1914-1998), is about the last category. Despite being best known for his poetry and essays, my focus in this presentation is on one of Paz’s few short stories, “Mi vida con una ola,” or “My Life with a Wave,” from his 1951 collection Aguila o sol. The story’s narrator and protagonist, an average male not unlike any other one might find in a large Latin American city during the middle of the previous century, travels to the coast. There he takes a bucket of sea water from a crashing wave and proceeds to fall in love with it. This is only natural. After all, the “wave” has all the qualities he ever wanted in a lover. This anthropomorphized wave, then, amounts to the story’s antagonist, and she and the narrator journey – improbably – through the major cycles of a failed relationship. With Paz, this story about a wave is also about other matters, which I will analize in this presentation.

Of particular interest is his understanding and use of the concept of solitude: a concept that in many respects has become emblematic of the Latin American condition and to some extent of the Latin American region as a whole. Solitude, for Paz, was not a static term: it evolved over the course of his career; similarly, his usage of the term takes on different meanings when refracted through his own changing biography and with changes in his cultural and historical milieu. This short presentation can at most allude to the various layers associated with Paz's deployment of "solitude," let alone the ways in which other Latin American intellectuals have engaged with the concept. That stated, part of my purpose here is to argue that in “My Life with a Wave” Paz probes the limits (human and beyond) of solitude.

As global ecological crises continue to escalate, the concept of scale has emerged as a pivotal focus in literary and cultural studies. James F. English and Ted Underwood assert that the intellectual history of literary studies is essentially a history of competing scales. Since 2010, ecological criticism has undergone a “scale turn,” which highlights the necessity of reimaging humanity through disparate and often incompatible scales, including human and geological dimensions (Dipesh Chakrabarty). In this context, integrating nonhuman narrators into ecological narratology becomes increasingly significant, particularly in examining their role in the expansion and transformation of scale within literary texts. Previous discussions of nonhuman narrators have primarily focused on categorizing their types and functions (Shang Biwu) or exploring their narrative roles in extending human experiences and projecting nonhuman perspectives (Lars Bernaerts et al.). This paper argues that nonhuman narrators not only create new spatiotemporal domains, thereby providing alternative possibilities for worldmaking, but also establish an array of distinct scales that diverges from the anthropocentric framework. Consequently, I propose the concept of “scale narrators” to differentiate them from anthropomorphized narrators. While both human and nonhuman narrators articulate actions involving humans and objects within human cognition, “scale narrators” serve as narrative agents that critically question, transform, and reconstruct vital quantitative aspects of the anthropocene scale. This includes dimensions of time and space in a physical sense, the historical trajectories of life, and the intricate relationships between humans and nonhumans. By foregrounding the role of “scale narrators,” this study seeks to enhance our understanding of ecological relationships and the positioning of humanity within these complex dynamics.

This study examines Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) through the lenses of nonhuman agency and nonhuman narratives, exploring the intersections between climate change, ecological crises, and the agency of nonhuman entities. Drawing from Ghosh’s theoretical works The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and The Uncanny and Improbable Events, this paper positions Gun Island as a transnational narrative reflecting human-induced environmental degradation, ecological refugees, and critiques of colonialism and global capitalism. Unlike the traditional Cli-Fi, Gun Island focuses on the present moment through a series of improbable encounters and events. As a work of climate realism, it employs decolonial and ecocritical frameworks to critique neoliberal global capitalism, emphasizing its role in exacerbating ecological and social injustices. The novel vividly portrays nonhuman entities—especially animals, omens, and uncanny phenomena—urging readers to engage with these improbable events. The paper further scrutinizes how Ghosh introduces new aesthetic and epistemological modes in Gun Island, highlighting the agency of nonhuman entities and their relevance to addressing climate change and other global issues. By challenging anthropocentrism in the context of climate change and colonialism, Gun Island exemplifies how nonhuman narratives provide modes of perception and experience that transcend the human realm, prompting readers to connect with real-world challenges.

In the 21st century, humanity faces crises like political conflict, climate change, environmental degradation, gender inequality, and the rise of artificial intelligence. Science fiction addresses these challenges through speculative scenarios that critique existing conditions and propose solutions. Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide exemplifies this, using Silicon Isle, a fictional hub for electronic waste recycling, to explore labor exploitation, environmental justice, and human-machine relationships.

Silicon Isle is portrayed as a dystopian space dominated by global capitalism, where hazardous e-waste is processed by marginalized "waste people." These workers endure poverty, health risks, and social exclusion while clashing with the island's native inhabitants, who exploit them while retaining socio-economic power. This tension mirrors global disparities between industrialized and developing regions burdened with environmental harm.

The novel’s central figure, Mimi, a "waste girl," embodies the fusion of human and nonhuman (machine) elements. Her transformation through advanced technology symbolizes new forms of communication and connection between humans and machines. Through Mimi, Waste Tide highlights the potential for technology to bridge human and nonhuman divides, challenging anthropocentric views that isolate humanity from its technological counterparts.

However, Waste Tide also reveals ambivalence in its portrayal of nonhuman entities. While advocating for human-nonhuman co-evolution, it often frames machines as external threats requiring control. Uniquely human traits like love and morality are contrasted with the alien nature of machines, reinforcing their separation. This duality complicates the novel’s stance, oscillating between integration and exclusion of nonhuman entities.

Through the lens of nonhuman theory, this study analyzes Waste Tide’s depiction of human-machine relationships and their broader implications. It examines how the novel critiques contemporary issues like labor exploitation and environmental destruction while envisioning alternative futures of collaboration and coexistence between humans and nonhumans.

The rise of children’s fantasy novels resonates with the intellectual shift to challenging conventional assumptions of consciousness, being, and reality. Margery Williams’s famous piece The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) stands out as a compelling exploration of reality through the lens of a toy’s transformation into a real rabbit. Through a character focalization, the narrative interrogates the life experience of an agential stuff rabbit, addressing deeper ontological and epistemological concerns with regards to a becoming reality in the entanglement between materiality and affection. Also, the inconsistency between the toy and human storyworlds manifests the tension between toys’ agency and immobility – a generic textual tension in toy narratives. Furthermore, the immobility suggests not only the incapacity of toys in a human world, but also the failure and blindness of human knowledge. The narrative thus points to a nonhuman ethics that advocates for interspecies respect and caring. In this way, Williams’ novel offers a beneficial consideration on the evolving nature of reality, relationship and love, encouraging readers to embrace the inevitable bruise of life as essential to becoming “Real.”

This paper explores the intersections between Orlando (1928) by Virginia Woolf and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin, focusing on the non-human narrative dimensions and the treatment of androgyny as a challenge to anthropocentric paradigms and binary gender structures. Drawing on Donna Haraway's theoretical concepts, such as the "cyborg" and "situated knowledges," the study highlights how these texts destabilize traditional boundaries — human/non-human, masculine/feminine, self/other, language/speech — and create speculative spaces for rethinking relationality and agency in a more-than-human world.

In Orlando, Woolf presents a narrative that transcends time and gender, featuring a protagonist who defies fixed identities. Similarly, Le Guin imagines a society where gender is fluid and contextual, shaped by the ecology and biology of the planet Gethen. At the same time, both works reveal the limitations of human imagination, as their narratives remain partly constrained by the linguistic and cultural frameworks they seek to transcend. These narratives align with Haraway’s critique of anthropocentrism by proposing hybrid existences that embrace complexity and interconnectedness.

By situating these works within the broader context of the "non-human turn" in literature, this paper argues that both authors invite readers to reimagine the boundaries of experience and agency, using fiction as a critical tool. Thus, Woolf and Le Guin expand the scope of non-human narratives, positioning speculative and modernist literature as essential instruments for addressing ethical and ecological challenges in a more-than-human context.

Marking language as the human-nonhuman boundary negates language’s material complexity and situatedness. Derived from Latin lingua, “tongue,” language is embedded in a sustained living body: breath breaking against teeth, hands scrambling across sheets of paper, symbols morphing through ages, and myriads of things (around but other than me) I want to refer to. Beyond a boundary, a reference, can language attune us to the “significant otherness” of species, things, and existences that do not speak our tongue (Haraway)? Can it reveal a shared world of co-constituted subjects?

Inspired by ecological thinkers like Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Marilyn Strathern, and Vinciane Despret, this paper explores the literary possibilities of writing co-constitution across species, relations, and assemblages. Writing during and after the existential crises of the World Wars, French authors sought new “forms” to make sense of a world in flux – internally and externally – interrogating language’s place in the collapse of (hu)man-centric ontology. Francis Ponge and Nathalie Sarraute, among others, pioneered literary interventions leading up to a distinct French ecocriticism in the 1980s and beyond. Ponge reconceives language in the shape of vegetal morphology and calcified seashells, imagining human subjects as “vibrating cords” that harmonize with nonlinguistic beings. Sarraute, dismantling conventional character-speech relations, takes apart “subject” into a constellation of “tropisms” – subtle, undercurrent movements in everyday exchanges – making these transient experiences into a legible, visible, and inhabitable body of co-constituted subjectivities.

Their approaches resonate with our current grappling with Large Language Models (LLMs) and questions of agency in human-machine interaction. In Sarraute’s Les Fruits d’or, the eponymous book in the story remains unknown to us; we only hear about Les Fruits d’or through a cacophony of reactions from its readers, mirroring the iterative, relational dynamics between machine-generated discourse and its users/co-programmers. Similarly, Ponge’s Le Parti pris des choses perceives daily life among things as a feedback loop, an interplay of human and nonhuman that resists linear causality and embraces transformation.

Al challenges our understanding of writing and real-time conversation, by also laying bare its rhizomatic existence: reference universes, iterative learning, palimpsestic algorithm overwriting, and the herculean effort in maintaining its material presence such as cooling systems, cables, data centers, and rare earth metals. Likewise, Ponge and Sarraute implicate and complicate multispecies relations, weaving our multimodal temporalities and realities into powerful narratives. As linguistic animals, we can tell stories that move beyond the self-endangering human “subject” and imagine instead “ecosophical subjectivities” (Guattari). Language means more than a prompt or a timely response to us, it is living itself (pun intended).