| Academic research often reflects social concerns and also acts as a response force.Following the civil rights movement,the feminist movement,and the independence movement of colonies in the 1960s,a large number of ethnic studies,feminist studies,and postcolonial studies emerged in the academic world.Those advocates and practitioners have been committed not only to challenging racial discrimination,gender discrimination and Western centralism within the disciplines,but also to deepening academic engagement and transforming the paradigm to influence the real world.Many fields,like feminist studies,for example,which were initially not recognized as "academic",have developed into a strong force in movement,practice and academia after a great deal of effort.The same thing now occurs on the animal question.Since the animal liberation in the 1970s,the rapidly growing field of Animal Studies(i.e.Human-Animal Studies)began to enter history and international academic discourse.No less than the disciplines mentioned above,Animal Studies,especially the issue of animal ethics,has received severe criticism.Some scholars claim that we have been occupied with the work of the ignored subhuman groups such as colored people,women,the poor,the disabled,children,and thus we have no leisure to attend to the so-called animal problem.As for this,Giorgio Agamben discloses that "in our culture the decisive political conflict,which governs every other conflict,is that between the animality and the humanity of man",the very reason for which is separating humans from other animals,therefore "it is more urgent to work on these divisions,to ask in what way—within man—has man been separated from non-man,and the animal from the human,than it is to take positions on the great issues,on so-called human rights and values".Jacques Derrida more directly demonstrates the importance of Animal Studies:the animal question is“decisive(as one says)in itself" and "for its strategic value".It is "decisive" because this is what need to do when we are faced with so much animal violence;it is“strategic" because the animal represents the limit upon which all the great concepts are formed and determined,such as the nature of man,the essence and future of humanity,ethics,politics,law,human rights,crimes against humanity,genocide,etc.It can be seen that the animal question,involving many aspects such as morality,politics,society,and environment,is not only important but also necessary for us to discuss extensively.Since the 21st century,achievements like papers,monographs,and conferences relating to Animal Studies have witnessed a quick rise,creating a universal trend of animal turn in Western humanities and social sciences.Tom Regan,who came up with one of the first animal rights theory,observes that in recent years the animal question has been so frequently discussed that“philosophers have written more about animal rights in the past twenty years than our processors wrote in the previous two thousand".Lawrence Simmons and Philip Armstrong assert that the animal turn is comparable in significance to the linguistic turn that revolutionized humanities and social science disciplines from the mid 20 century onwards.In the literary field,researchers have been probing animals writing with a range of critical theories in and across disciplines.However,most of them focus on British and American literatures and often apply discourse analysis;besides,very few of them communicate with sciences,especially the life sciences.The biggest problem is,as Kenneth Shapiro and Marion Copeland point out,that our literary criticism is“speciesism":a full-blown,animal-based,interpretative theory should examine the status of the use of nonhuman animals as symbols,that is,whether an animal could appear as himself or herself,“as an individual with some measure of autonomy,agency,voice,character,and as a member of a species with a nature that has certain typical capabilities and limitations".Contemporary New English Fiction is a by-product of the long-term usage of English in the colonies,mainly involving English literature in Africa,South Asia Subcontinent,Australia,New Zealand,Canada and the Caribbean except Britain and the United States.Since the second half of the 20th century,the rising New English Literatures have greatly enriched the traditional English literature and attracted wide attention of the global literary critics.At present,researchers mostly conduct the discussion from such perspectives as post-colonialism,diaspora and feminism,while ignoring the animal writing.As a matter of fact,the animal writing in such works has constituted an indescribable phenomenon and a rich landscape.Ontologically focusing on the animal,the writers have made a steady improvement in theme exploration,image shaping,artistic representation and ethical appeal.From the perspective of Animal Studies,integrating other perspectives such as Marxism,postcolonial studies,feminist studies,ecocriticism,psychoanalysis,neohistoricism,new criticism,posthumanism,cyborg and cognitive ethology,my dissertation aims to explore the animal representation and systematic relationship between its symbolic meanings and real animals in the following masterpieces of contemporary New English Fiction:the South African writer J.M.Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians(1980)and The Lives of Animals(1999),the Indian writer Indra Sinha's Animal's People(2007),the Canadian writers Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake(2003),Yann Martel's Li of Pi(2001),and the Australian writer Tim Winton' s Shallows(1984).My research will examine how how animals are configured differently in human cultures gives significance to animals and human culture per se,how literature represents an authentic animal voice and speaks for animals beyond anthropocentrism,and how animals shape both the ideologies and the material experience of internal and external spaces of man in civilization.It contends that“Other,Alterity,Humanimal",the defining characteristic of animal writing in contemporary New English Fiction,is not only the animal narrative strategy of a single literary text but also the dominant theme through all animal representations.In“Other Writing",the writers challenge the anthropocentrism as well as the deriving discriminations by exposing the ultimate power-oppression behind life politics;in "Alterity Writing",the writers correct the above through an attempt to construct animal subjectivity with recognition of differences;in"Humanimal Writing",the writers reveal the paradoxical coexistence between humanity and animality,between humans and animals.My dissertation consists of three chapters which are further divided into nine sections in addition to introduction and conclusion.The introduction part firstly introduces the topic and explains the research background.Secondly,it provides an overview of relevant existing researches abroad and at home,summarizing the key achievements(strength and weakness).Thirdly,it clarifies the research object and some key concepts,then presents the research perspective,main argument,research method and innovations of this dissertation.Chapter One investigates the homologous structural elements in the discrimination base between various "-isms" addressed by postmodern other-poetics and speciesism within Richard Ryder and Peter Singer's theoretical framework.It firstly looks into the subject of convergence of Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism within the colonial enterprise at three different interfaces-political aggression,economic oppression and cultural infiltration;secondly,it expounds the cognate relation between sexism and speciesism respectively in family and society;thirdly,it deals with the animal violence and mass extinction caused by development-oriented and scientific technology-oriented policies.Chapter Two,in dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida,analyzes how the writers represent cognition process and social culture in animals with intent thereby to reflect on what is human and what is animal in ontology and epistemology.It starts with an interpretation of the story about how the so-called "animal's people"recognize the animalness of man;next,it discusses different stylistic features of animal narratives used by the writers to deconstruct the subject of metaphysics,dialectical materialism and essentialism;after that,it probes the absolute otherness of animals portrayed in the text,which urges to explore the question whether the animal can be considered as the other that enjoys the unconditioned welcome.Chapter Three performs a hermeneutic study concerning the blurred and ambiguous boundaries between humanity and animality,between humans and animals emphasized by the authors in their works based on Sigmund Freud's civilization theory and Gilles Deleuze's becoming-animal.It begins with a dissection of the mechanism for defining human(ity)by negating animals or conceal animality,specifically speaking,man's original desire for power and eating;it then examines the constant but futile attempt to search for absolute rationality of humanism within the human and posthuman context;lastly,it demonstrates the writers'thinking on how/whether humans and animals can co-exist harmoniously in real world,with particular attention to companion animals and activism for animals.The conclusion part summarizes the major points of this dissertation and recommends the direction of future research. |
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