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Encountering the Animal: Explorations in
American Literature
Türkiye’de
Hayvan Çalışmaları alanında basılmış ilk kitaplardan olan “Encountering the
Animal: Explorations in American Literature” önemli bir boşluğu doldurmakla kalmıyor, bu
alanda yapılacak yeni çalışmalara da zemin oluşturuyor.
Encountering the
Animal: Explorations in American Literature; insanın hayvanlarla çeşitli biçimlerde
karşılaşmalarını, Amerikan Edebiyatının ilk dönemlerinden çağdaş yazarlarına
uzanan bir panorama sunarak ele almakta.Kitap, son on yıl içinde Batı edebiyatında belki de en hızla yükselen
akım olan “Hayvan Çalışmaları” ya da “İnsan-Hayvan Çalışmaları”konusunda bir sunuş ve uygulamalar içeriyor.
Bu kitapta Hayvan Çalışmaları; insanı hayvandan ayırdığına inanılan en önemli
ayraç olan dil, uygar insan-hayvanlar/hayvanlık ve hayvan-kadın bağlantıları
açısından tanıtılıyor, ele alınan yapıtlarda da bu noktalar vurgulanıyor.
Nilsen Gökçen’in çalışması
uygarlığın gittikçe önemsizleştirerek neredeyse görünmez kıldığı hayvan
varlıklarının en beklenmedik biçimde nasıl karşımıza çıktıklarını gösterirken,
insanın gerçekten “insan” olabilmesinin koşulunun, kendi “hayvan” bedeniyle ve
diğer hayvanlarla bağlarını yeniden keşfetmesi olduğunun da altını çiziyor.
Encountering the Animal: Explorations in American Literature
Nilsen Gökçen
Encountering
the Animal: Explorations in American Literature presents varieties
of human-animal encounters along a panorama that ranges from the early examples
of American fiction to contemporary authors. As well as discussions on literary
texts, the book includes an Introduction to the Animal Studies or Human-Animal
Studies, a field that has shown probably the fastest growth in the West in the
last decades. Animal Studies, an interdisciplinary platform enriched with
contributions from scholars and thinkers from philosophy, applied sciences, as
well as literature, has been the focus of increasing critical attention as a
result of the rising ecological awareness and recent studies that topple down
humans from their privileged and exclusive positions, proving not only the
extraordinary similarities between animals and humans but also the emotional
and psychological human need for animals. In this book, Animal Studies has been
introduced and discussed with particular emphasis on language, the most
prominent line of division between humans and animals, on civilized humanity
vs. animals/animality, and on animal-human relationships and connections.
Based on such a theoretical background, Nilsen
Gökçen’s work demonstrates unexpected instances of encounters with animals that
have become rendered insignificant and almost invisible by the fiction of
civilization. After an introduction to the major figures and debates in Human-Animal
Studies, the next two chapters discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
and The Marble Faun respectively with
particular emphases on the connections between animals and women, who have likewise
been made invisible by both religion and science, and on the lost human-animal
ties with references to the biblical narratives. The chapter that examines the
Southern writer Flannery O’Connor’s Wise
Blood discusses the animal images within the human-city-civilization context.
The last chapter which discusses the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood’s
feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale
delves deeper into the connection between women’s and animals’ bodies and
demonstrates how women’s bodies merge with the images of consumable meat, pets,
game animals, or the feared and annihilated wild animals. The book concludes
with reemphasizing the point that the condition for humanity’s reaching its
potential to become really “human” depends on a rediscovery of the animality of
the human body and its ancient ties with other animals.
The significance of Nilsen Gökçen’s book lies in its
coverage of American literature from canonical to contemporary texts and in
being one of the first books published in Turkey on Animal Studies, which can
provide grounds for forthcoming research in the field.