Species and Psyche: Anthropomorphism and Environmentalism in Human-Animal Metafiction
| dc.contributor.author | Surendranathan, Hema | |
| dc.contributor.chair | Brown, Laura Schaefer | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Attell, Kevin D. | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Anker, Elizabeth | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Levine, Caroline Elizabeth | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2021-09-09T17:41:05Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-06-09T06:00:41Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2021-05 | |
| dc.description | 189 pages | |
| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation argues that twentieth and twenty-first century metafictions such as A.S. Byatt’s “Morpho Eugenia” (1992), J.M Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (2014) make revisions to the aesthetic category of anthropomorphism for ethical ends. Through their self-reflexivity, metafictions trouble the boundaries between reality and fiction. And in doing so, the metafictions in Species and Psyche, focused on human-animal relationships, offer an amendment to anthropocentric approaches to nonhuman animals by mirroring—in defiance or affirmation—the ontological play that constitutes the human subject and defines this subject in relation to, but as different from, the nonhuman world it must negotiate.I advance the idea that metafiction enables the revision of anthropomorphism by pursuing the connection between self-reflexivity and the psyche. In order to develop this point about the ethical revision of anthropomorphism, my readings of twentieth and twenty-first century metafictions draw upon theories of the psyche that are invested in how internal and external objects shape the subject’s capacity for care. In psychoanalytic theories of subject and relational formation by Freud, Klein, Winnicott and their successors, care is born from the management of both external and internal nonhuman objects that constitute the development of the human subject. This destabilization of the subject-object binary in regards to subject and relational formation suggests that the projection of human qualities enacted in anthropomorphism might similarly be corrected by adjustments to the boundaries between self and other, human and nonhuman, individual and environment. Species and Psyche contributes to contemporary debates about nonhuman animals and the environment in literature by assessing the viability of applying psychoanalytic models for relational well-being aimed at individuals to the globe. I argue that the fundamentally subjective processes described by psychoanalysis are valuable because of their inherent interconnection to the well-being and survival of the subject whose sustained agency is required for environmentalist action. The ethical revision of anthropomorphism invited by metafictions, and illustrated by psychoanalysis, suggests that individual change is necessary for new commitments to the nonhuman world, especially in the urgent context of climate crisis. | |
| dc.identifier.doi | https://doi.org/10.7298/mgw8-9f13 | |
| dc.identifier.other | Surendranathan_cornellgrad_0058F_12444 | |
| dc.identifier.other | http://dissertations.umi.com/cornellgrad:12444 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1813/109809 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.subject | Environmental Humanities | |
| dc.subject | Literary Animal Studies | |
| dc.subject | Metafiction | |
| dc.subject | Object-relations theory | |
| dc.subject | Play | |
| dc.subject | Psychoanalysis | |
| dc.title | Species and Psyche: Anthropomorphism and Environmentalism in Human-Animal Metafiction | |
| dc.type | dissertation or thesis | |
| dcterms.license | https://hdl.handle.net/1813/59810 | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | English Language and Literature | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | Cornell University | |
| thesis.degree.level | Doctor of Philosophy | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph. D., English Language and Literature |
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