The historical trajectory of the worlding project, as demonstrated by the effective collaboration between Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour in their human-and-nonhuman approach to cosmopolitanism and by the further interpretations and expansions of this approach by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Donna Haraway, is evident. A consistent emphasis on incorporating nonhuman elements into storytelling pervades the worlding project, from Latour's concept of agency to Stengers' idea of the 'middle voice' to de la Bellacasa's care and Haraway's creation of new mythologies. For example, Donna Haraway's emphasis on mythologies implies that, to participate in the interconnected relations of humans and nonhumans, humans should not rely solely on human creativity and intellect; instead, humans must also embrace the quasi-narrative by nonhumans as part of the collaborative efforts with them.

To further connect the anthropological aspect of worlding with narrative, this project will examine how narratological suggestions in the worlding project can assist in identifying new narrative modes of nonhuman storytelling. Specifically, the project aims to respond to the call from anthropologists and science historians for a refreshed narrative approach and the critical need to theorize non-anthropomorphized narration. The project's core concern is to map new modes of non-anthropomorphized nonhuman narration. This research will explore non-anthropomorphized narration, responding to the challenges posed by the worlding project theorists, and advocate for the expansion of narratological vocabulary to adequately register non-anthropomorphized narration. To this end, two 2021 novels will be examined: Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness and Charlotte McConaghy's Once There Were Wolves.

Re-questioning and reassessing the function of poetry seems a timely topic in our age as the human civilization confronts the overwhelming power of digitalized knowledge.　Throughout history poetry has left traces of individual voices, creating cracks in the existing texture of meaning. With the overwhelming power of artificial intelligence, now with its generative capacity to combine words, create phrases and verses, editing and recreating from its omni-knowledgeable source of information, it can apparently produce something equivalent to literature, including poetry.

In the Japanese case, attempts have been made to allow the AI to produce haiku, the result of which was relatively successful. Having been fed the database consisting of 150 million pieces from the past and given all the necessary rules, it performed wonderfully, producing what looks like top quality haiku. Can this be regarded as poetry? My question extends further to whether such a method would apply to free-verse poetry, which has no rules. Free-verse constituted the main body of modern Japanese poetry, which moved away from a set syllabic structure and experimented with words to create new meaning, conveying messages that could not be expressed through straightforward narrative. The very intention of such enterprise lay in breaking down the grammatical conventions, dislocating common understanding, creating blank spaces between words in order to allow the unspoken message to arise. Could this be possibly done with artificial intelligence? Obviously, this is not a random dislocating process, and behind each poetic creation stands the human body, its intricate workings of senses, and the idiosyncratic experience of each individual poet, leading to the singularity of every poetic piece.

In this presentation I will explore in particular the relationship between body and language, how the bodily perception and the bodily experience play a crucial role in poetic creation, and how poetry has functioned and will continue to function as a potential power to resist against the mainstream discourse, creating a tear in the ordinary, challenging the accepted understanding of things, urging us to see the world in different light, uncover the myths, discover new landscapes, and hear unverbalized voices. Paying attention to the inseparable connection between body and language in the making of poetry, I believe, is of particular importance in our age so thoroughly penetrated by digital information, so much so that against the inundation of verbal utterances online we must be constantly be reminded that humans do live as bodily beings and that it is through our body that language is spoken, messages are conveyed and sentiments are shared. (2737 characters, space included)