Kierkegaard's critiques of Romanticism in both his early and later periods involve the image of plant. In his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard criticizes " plant life" as the highest pursuit in Lucinde, arguing that it leads to a static and negative state of "aesthetic numbness." However, the botanical image cited in Lucinde actually points to the organic unity of spiritual life behind the fragmented pieces. Referring to Schlegel’s texts, this study further analyzes the relationship between individuality—which Schlegel considers impossible to classify using Linnaean taxonomy—and aggregation. This desire for unity among individuals constitutes what Schlegel describes as the religion of love.

In his later work, What We Learn from the Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air, Kierkegaard continues to differentiate between the two ideals and their reconciliation with reality, criticizing poets for their sentimental alleviation of the pain caused by the division between the eternal and the finite world, which he sees as false and insincere. He urges poets to learn from the lily, which represents nature, embracing seriousness, silence, obedience, and joy.

Examining Friedrich Schlegel's use of images related to the plant life cycle in On the Study of Greek Poetry and the fragments of the proposed continuation of Lucinde, it becomes clear that Schlegel, while valuing nature represented by plants as a critique of the division and utilitarianism brought about by intellect, actually acknowledges the potential for infinite human freedom and establishes a subtle connection between human freedom and nature.

Marshalling critical animal studies as its primary theoretical framework, this paper examines and compares the representation of animals and human-nonhuman relationships in Julio Cortázar’s and Guadalupe Nettel’s short stories. Placing “Axolotl” and “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” in Cortázar’s Blow-up and Other Stories (1967) and Nettel’s “The Marriage of the Red Fish” and “War in the Trash Cans” from Natural Histories (2014) in dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s, Donna Haraway’s, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s relevant theories, I look into each story by first examining the animal figures in relation to their encounters with the human, highlighting the sites of eyes and mouth. Then, I explore how the complexity of interspecies interactions is presented via parallel narratives and portrayal of traumatic experiences. I suggest that, through identification and dis-identification between humans and animals, both authors go beyond conventional bestiary writing and challenge the inherent boundaries between species.