“The Animal, Whatever It Was”: Dogs, Multi-Species Subjectivity, And The Signifier Guide In Go Down, Moses, And The Call Of The Wild
- ASU Author/Contributor (non-ASU co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Institution
- Appalachian State University (ASU )
- Web Site: https://library.appstate.edu/
- Advisor
- Zackary Vernon
Abstract: Whom or what do we write about when we write about dogs? This thesis attempts to answer this question in part by analyzing the ways in which dogs have been reductively represented in literature, particularly in wilderness narratives that tend to mistake nature and culture as separate spaces. The two narratives I focus on to demonstrate this argument are William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942), and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903). I begin with establishing the opposite poles that various texts seem to gravitate toward when portraying animals. On one end, we often read texts that sentimentalize, mythologize, or anthropomorphize animals. On the opposite end, texts err on the side of stressing scientific observation to the point that the human is detached from nonhuman animals. Faulkner’s text seems to emulate the former and London’s the latter. In both cases, the narratives deny the subjectivity of animals and their lived experience.
“The Animal, Whatever It Was”: Dogs, Multi-Species Subjectivity, And The Signifier Guide In Go Down, Moses, And The Call Of The Wild
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Created on 1/31/2019
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- Wharton, J. (2018). “The Animal, Whatever It Was”: Dogs, Multi-Species Subjectivity, And The Signifier Guide In Go Down, Moses, And The Call Of The Wild. Unpublished Master’s Thesis. Appalachian State University, Boone, NC.
- Language: English
- Date: 2018
- Keywords
- Animal Studies, Dog Writing, Wilderness Narrative,
William Faulkner, Donna Haraway