Translated Riverscapes: A Poetics (Yún-fēi Jí 季云飞, Three Gorges Migration《三峡移民》; Mèng Jiāo孟郊, Laments of the Gorges《峽哀》; William Carlos Williams, Paterson; Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home)

The biophysical reality of our present is not merely the object of crisis; it is one of the forms in which a crisis of contemporary epistemology becomes materially undeniable. In this dissertation, poetics names not simply the study of literary devices but a comparative method for describing how forms make worlds legible under altered ecological and historical conditions. The problem is not only that we risk misdescribing the world, but that a historically specific genre of the human, of knowledge, and of value has materially organized the current condition. Modern autonomy has not failed so much as succeeded, wildly so: it depends on producing an outside called nature and on displacing costs beyond what individuals can perceive or be held accountable for. What appears as freedom depends on a material displacement of relations. I use anthropogenic condition to name the return of those displaced costs as feedback—into waters, bodies, archives, and atmospheres. As that feedback intensifies, the stance of external observation becomes harder to sustain, and familiar ideas of agency and responsibility—grounded in intention, consent, remedy, and the bounded liberal subject that subtends them—struggle to align with consequences emerging from coupled human-technical-ecological systems. This scalar mismatch makes “we” legible as a species only at scales ordinary experience cannot inhabit, even as it reveals how critiques of domination remain haunted by the autonomist premises of the subject they seek to displace.

            The dissertation develops riverscape as both an integrating unit of analysis and a method for tracing this transformation without claiming a view from nowhere. Riverscape names the way river systems convert flow into power, record, and habit, and the way sediment, sound, and syntax register a logic of return in which feedback is not metaphor but material process. Across the Yangzi at the Three Gorges, the Passaic at the Great Falls in William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s speculative Na Valley through which Sinshan Creek flows in  Always Coming Home, the dissertation asks how literary and aesthetic forms make anthropogenic feedback sensible beyond the limits of ordinary perception, even as each riverscape organizes that problem through distinct histories, infrastructures, and political imaginaries.

            The argument is therefore poetic before it is diagnostic: not the recovery of hidden content, but the development of a descriptive vocabulary adequate to forms already responding to conditions our criticism still struggles to name. Its comparative method proceeds through ecotranslation: a practice that treats translation not as transfer between stable equivalents but as the condition under which meaning travels across disciplines, languages, media, and scales. Because traveling terms shift as they migrate, the dissertation makes that transformation deliberate, using biosemiotic analysis to show how descriptions and metaphors organize what counts as evidence, agency, and relation. Biosemiotics matters here because it treats description itself as semiosis and insists that indices and icons are ecological operations—signs that adhere and route through media like water and bodies. Opacity, in turn, functions as an ethical and methodological constraint against forced commensurability, and as a necessary extension of the anthropogenic condition itself: the limit of transparent accounting in a world where consequences return across scales no subject can fully inhabit.

            Part I examines Yun-fei Ji’s scroll Three Gorges Migration and Meng Jiao’s Xia Ai (“Laments [of the Three] Gorges”) to show how state heritage apparatuses convert rivers into monumental data and how recursion appears as visual saturation and syntactic breakdown. Part II reads Williams’s Paterson through Peircean biosemiotics rather than the Zen and Deep Ecology frameworks that dominate ecopoetics, recovering Williams’s pragmatist-democratic-semiotic project and showing how municipal infrastructures—property, record, evidence—produce the liberal subject even as anthropogenic feedback decomposes that subject’s claims to sovereignty. Part III turns to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home to elaborate yintopic poetics and its according subjectivity (her term, my application): a mode of personhood composed through recursion as patterned return rather than sovereign coherence, and through distributed, mortal, and accountable relation rather than autopoietic closure, with its preservationist and managerial logic.

            The dissertation argues that futurity cannot be secured by utopian projection or cynical resignation but must be composed through practices adequate to recursion—yintopic (dark, yielding, participatory) rather than utopic (bright, intentional, transcendent, sovereign). In this sense, poetics becomes ecological practice: not the representation of entanglement from afar, but the composition of a post-sovereign agency grounded in recursive, mediated, and accountable participation.[1] By carrying remainder forward without coercive closure, such forms respond to the radical vulnerability of environments that are ourselves and recast responsibility not as mastery over consequences but as answerability within the shared media through which those consequences and vulnerabilities emerge, circulate, and return.