3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Postcolonial animals: an exploration of human-animal relationships in literature(2021) Wheeler, Alexandra-MaryGrowing concern about animals and the environment has brought with it an increase in the number of texts that represent and explore ecologically oriented issues. By examining selected texts by Margaret Atwood, J.M. Coetzee, Yann Martel, Cormac McCarthy, Zakes Mda and Ruth Ozeki that present animals as individual beings, and/or the impact that human activity is having on the nonhuman world, this thesis discusses the importance of literature in advocating compassionate and biocentric worldviews and lifestyles. With the advent of the environmental crisis, it has become necessary to critique the validity of the human/animal divide particularly at this point in our collective global history when the negative impact of human activity is becoming increasingly visible everywhere. With this in mind, animal presences in the selected texts have been read and understood as being representative of animals themselves, and not as indirect commentary and/or representations of anthropocentric issues, with the aim of drawing attention to the plight of nonhuman life in the age of the Anthropocene. The discussion explores literature’s usefulness as a tool for imagining, representing, and disseminating knowledge about human-animal relationships, and how it offers a space for us to reconfigure these relationships in ways that challenge the human/animal binary. In so doing, I argue for literature’s positive contribution towards our ethical and moral evolution as a species, specifically where the nonhuman is concerned, and how a change in global ethics that is more inclusive of other species is inextricably connected to how we understand and view human-animal relationships, and situate ourselves in the world.Item 'How do I speak about the past?" Bernhard Schlink and the genre of Vaterliteratur(2013-09-11) Wheeler, Alexandra-MaryThis dissertation functions as an exploration of German author Bernhard Schlink’s engagement with the genre of Vӓterliteratur (Literature about Fathers). By examining how Schlink has used adaptations of this genre in his novels The Reader (1998), Homecoming (2009) and short story Girl with Lizard (2002), this project will attempt to ascertain the extent to which one can view these texts as part of a new wave of father writing that has emerged in the German post-unification space. The question dominating this research project and contained in the first part of the title: “How do I speak about the Past”, implies that part of this research will examine Schlink’s portrayal of the second-generation’s attempt to understand and give voice to their experiences in postwar Germany. As such, my work engages with the emergence of Vӓterliteratur as being the result of an incomplete attempt by second-generation Germans to confront Germany’s national traumatic past during the 1968 Student Movement. However, while Schlink’s work demonstrates a familiarity with the content, structure and themes present in the first wave of Vӓterliteratur he appears to rewrite these into a fictionalised format, demonstrating the continued need in German society to work through the past. In many respects the texts selected for analysis in this dissertation deviate from the traditional conventions found within the earlier father novels, and interestingly appear to emphasise the previously marginalised role of women both during and postwar. What I will demonstrate is that while Schlink’s work makes use of the conventions found in Vӓterliteratur, and by doing so explores the postwar relationships between fathers and sons, it also indirectly engages with the experiences of German women and their own perpetration of, or suffering as a result of the patriarchal attitudes present in, Nazism. Through this dual portrayal (the presence of both men and women) Schlink gives a new perspective to the complexities of German postwar life as seen through the eyes of the second-generation.