Spectral Animals: Autobiographical Strategies for 21st-Century Humans

Bishop, Graham Lucas

Full Metadata

Overview

Year:: 2021
Contributor:: Bishop, Graham Lucas (creator); Redfield, Marc (Advisor); Ravindranathan, Thangam (Reader); Bewes, Timothy (Reader); Brown University. Department of Comparative Literature (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Autobiography; Disability studies; Contemporary Literature; Film theory; Ecocriticism; Animal Studies; Derrida, Jacques; Francophone studies; Deconstruction; Literature and technology; Speculative fiction
Extent:: viii, 288 p.

Files

Description

Abstract:: Seeking to derive a set of “autobiographical strategies” for humans living in the era of ecological catastrophe and technological upheaval, this dissertation examines the role played by “spectral animals” in an array of Anglophone and Francophone narrative texts produced over the last half-century. Both drawing on and critiquing the work of Jacques Derrida, this project argues that the “spectral” presence assigned to animals in contemporary literature yields insight into the flawed autobiographies we as humans have individually and collectively written for ourselves in defining our relationship to the nonhuman world. Animals, like specters, resist the oppositions between present and absent, visible and invisible, that have served to exclude them from autobiographical narrative. This project argues that the human, in order to survive the 21st century and beyond, must rewrite its autobiography by reexamining the spectral threshold dividing humanity and animality. Such a reexamination would reveal spectrality as a shared condition of being that allows for the inscription of human and nonhuman life, self and Other, within a shared time and space. Literary works that I argue approach the spectrality common to human and nonhuman forms of life include animal autobiographies by Alain Mabanckou and Tristan Garcia; autism narratives by Mark Haddon, Temple Grandin, and Fernand Deligny; apocalyptic fiction by Thomas Pynchon and Margaret Atwood; and wildlife documentaries produced by the BBC Natural History Unit and Jacques Perrin. Philosophical works by Heidegger, Levinas, Baudrillard, McLuhan, Deleuze and Guattari, and Lacan complement my Derridean deconstructionist readings of these texts. This dissertation concludes that contemporary disruptions of autobiographical narrative taking place through the mass dissemination of virtual images and simulacra present the human with a choice between two fates it may share with the spectral animal: annihilation, which will result if we continue to approach spectrality as a condition of being-(un)dead in the world; or survival, which we can choose by approaching spectrality as an opportunity for a sense of history that defies the oppositions between past and future, living and dead.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2021

Content

Citation

Bishop, Graham Lucas, "Spectral Animals: Autobiographical Strategies for 21st-Century Humans" (2021). Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:g79e7hws/

Relations

Collection:

Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Comparative Literature department.
...