Pets: Posthumanist discussions concerning the relationship between human and nonhuman animals in the contemporary novel.
This study focuses on intimate relationships between humans and dogs in selected novels from Australia, Canada and the United States. It is written from a critical position within Human-Animal Studies and analyzes fictional encounters that are conscious of the human-animal binary. The movement on the constructed boundaries of human/animal, nature/culture and domestication/wilderness is written into these literary accounts. My aim is to show how these novels can challenge or even deconstruct these boundaries. This is done by pointing out the underlying politics of literary representation.
In order to get a feeling for the kinds of political, social and historical circumstances that shape human-animal encounters, the theories and methodologies chapter preceding the literary analysis discusses the reasons for an increased awareness of nonhuman agency from a philosophical, sociological and academic point of view. A short excursion to the beginnings of human-canine co-domestication brings historical evidence to one of the major points of focus of my study: the co-evolutionary aspect of human-canine relations.
A suspicious reading that is based on a critical posthumanist perspective guides my analysis of the primary literature that encompasses the three main chapters of my dissertation. Each of these focuses on one or two novels. The focus comes from the most prevailing issues that the novels raise themselves, thereby producing theory from within the literary works and allowing me to go into detail with each primary text alongside a bigger theme. Part one is concerned with ‘becoming-animal.’ The focalized novel for this part is the Australian Dog Boy by Eva Hornung. Part two looks at the language aspect. Here, the two American novels The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski and Timbuktu by Paul Auster are read closely with regard to a unique human-canine language and modes of substituting the lack of canine spoken language. Part three discusses the Canadian novel Wild Dogs by Helen Humphreys. This work raises awareness of the wider topic of queer animalities.
The aim of analyzing human-canine relations in contemporary fiction is to detect representational possibilities that take canine characters seriously. The rhetoric surrounding canine-human communication and interaction reveals how boundaries between human and nonhuman animal are drawn, how agency is awarded, and how hierarchies are established within interspecies settings. The active role of the reader and his or her interpretation reflects how fictional human-animal relations mirror everyday encounters with domesticated animals and how these experiences can affect our thinking and our ethics regarding interspecies companionship.
Current debates about the place and rights of nonhuman animals, as well as fictional texts, reflect how humans think about themselves and their nonhuman others. Tuning in to these viewpoints and critically analyzing them reveals much about the current state of affairs regarding interspecies relations. This dissertation fills the gap of a critical literary study of novels where highly relevant issues such as identity, belonging, economical and personal crises, as well as empathy and emotional attachment are made visible. The Animal Turn and the growing field of Human-Animal Studies are not only taken as a temporal but also an interpretive frame.
