DECENTERING THE 'HUMAN': POSITING A POSTHUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS IN WATERSHIP DOWN AND THE WHITE BONE

Abstract

Despite the prevalence and persistence of anthropomorphic literature, the act of anthropomorphism itself has historically been derided for its supposed over sentimentality and unscientific nature. My thesis hopes to recuperate anthropomorphism as a legitimate mode of engaging with animals, both within and beyond the boundaries of anthropomorphic texts. To do so necessitates a shift towards posthuman modes of thought, which I argue entails an embracing of fluidity, imbrication, and boundary transgression. My thesis begins with a consideration of how humanistic renderings of anthropomorphic texts may be pivoted so as to destabilize and decenter the ‘human’ of humanism, a move which allows us to mine humanistic readings for their practical utility. I engage with allegorical interpretations of Watership Down and The White Bone, two texts that evince a type of ‘high anthropomorphism’, and which have been received by some critics as allegorical narratives. Such allegorical narratives, I counter, may be said to challenge humanism by ironizing, even exaggerating, anthropocentric practices. Critically managing humanistic renderings of the texts in turn opens us to the possibility of reading them beyond humanistic frameworks, where we might begin to recognize their ecological consciousness and fundamental concern with the ethics of representing animal experientialities. My thesis then moves into posthuman modes of engagement with the text, specifically by considering shared vulnerability and finitude in the experience of death, as explicated by Derrida, as an affective ‘entry-point’ into community with animals. Here, I posit the affective mode as a mode capable of enabling imbrication between reader and text, whereby the reader him/herself comes to inhabit a “material-semiotic” (Haraway 4), posthuman body. Such a move, I argue, necessarily engages with posthumanism as an embodied, embedded mode, rather than as an abstract, remote one.