The character of animality : species difference and narrative form in American fiction, 1890-1970
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The Character of Animality challenges the critical commonplace that literary character can only reveal fiction's inescapable anthropocentrism. I argue instead that twentieth-century American literature positions character as a vital tool for imagining consciousness and complex behavior beyond the human. In readings of Jack London, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Philip K. Dick, I uncover a century-long controversy over fiction's capacity to represent nonhuman animals, placing literary studies in direct conversation (or heated debate) with comparative psychology and the uneven behaviorism of its approach to animal life. When read together, the novel and the scientific discourse of animality both approach animal character as a set of strategies for representing the life of the mind under conditions of uncertainty, highlighting the shared limits of scientific empiricism and narratorial authority. For that reason, the possibility of fictionalizing animal minds informs the deep concerns of American literary history from the advent of Darwinian thought until the present day. Far from merely troubling the category of the human, the character systems of American novels offer a veritable poetics of species difference. Each of my four chapters describes a moment when animal character becomes more than a metaphor, colliding dramatically with the material reality of species. The first chapter reads Jack London's dogs and Upton Sinclair's pigs as the paradigmatic subjects of naturalist narration, registering the period's response to the taboo on animal sentience forming in the natural sciences. My second and third chapters jump forward to the interwar period that saw the blossoming of comparative psychology, showing that modernist fiction absorbs and revises the ambivalent anti-mentalism of the animal sciences through such characters as Faulkner's Benjy Compson and Hurston's talking buzzards. In my final chapter, I consider how literature engaged with midcentury cybernetics, arguing that Philip K. Dick and other writers borrow the ambivalent figure of the animal-machine to think the ethics of animal representation. At each juncture, I interrogate a different sense of likeness between character and animal, in the process re-opening the question of what it means for a character to resemble anything at all.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Googasian, Victoria Susan | |
|---|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | McGurl, Mark, 1966- | |
| Thesis advisor | McGurl, Mark, 1966- | |
| Thesis advisor | Moya, Paula M. L | |
| Thesis advisor | Ngai, Sianne | |
| Thesis advisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- | |
| Degree committee member | Moya, Paula M. L | |
| Degree committee member | Ngai, Sianne | |
| Degree committee member | Woloch, Alex, 1970- | |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Victoria Susan Googasian. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Victoria Susan Googasian
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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