A Posthumanist Reading of Glacial Agency in “The Glacier”

This article adopts a posthumanist perspective to read glacial agency in John Ruskin’s poem. The glacier breaks the chain of death and exercises its agency in different ways: the cliff, chasm, voice, and spasm. This glacial agency elicits from the human mind an aesthetic response to the sublime and subverts the binary logic of human cognition. The shift from the visual to the auditory world further undermines visual mastery and places the human subject into a spatialized relation. The final juxtaposition of the ascent of the mountains and the descent of the humans invites readers to speculate on the potential forms of coexistence of humans and nonhumans. This posthumanist reading deepens our understanding of Ruskin’s concept of the sublime and his contemplation on the relationship between human beings and nonhuman agents.