On a Possibility of Ecocritical View on the Thematisation of “Nonhuman Subjectivity” in Literature
Keywords:
world literature, thematology – animals, literary aesthetics, literary interpretation, anthropocentrism, ecocriticism, sublime, Yeats, William Butler, Woolf, Virginia, Zajc, DaneAbstract
The theoretical starting point of this article is the observation that, although deconstruction as a method with its unsolvable aporias still persists in the grip of binaries as hierarchical oppositions (subject vs. object), on the other hand it strives to articulate other, different methods. These methods have more opportunities to extend beyond binary oppositional logic due to their interdisciplinary origin. Ecocriticism, as a contemporary trend in post-deconstructional literary criticism that calls into question the various ways nature is represented in literature, could develop into one of these methods. By transforming the outer world into the symbol of the relationship of the self towards itself, Western philosophy established the supremacy of the mind towards the nature as Other. This article explores how this Other, in this case the animal, is represented in literary texts. The Kantian concept of the sublime, which implies the notion of unrepresentability and consequently also the notion of exceeding logos, is inseparable from the literary representation of nature, particularly the representation of the human relationship with nature. The article shows that the Kantian concept of the sublime, in order to become productive in considering the possibilities of representing nonhuman subjectivity, must necessarily be combined with other epistemological tools. Therefore it introduces two notions: “anomaly” (Fr. anomalie) and “becoming-animal” (Fr. devenir l’animal), which can aid in surpassing the traditional binary hierarchical oppositional logic between subject and object, and highlights the possibilities of the non-anthropocentric attitude in literature. In this respect, the article deals with three texts: the poem “To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-no” by William Butler Yeats, the short biographical novel Flush by Virginia Woolf, and the novelette “Rumeni maček” (“Yellow Cat”) by Dane Zajc.References
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