Mongrelized subjects: Modernism and human/dog coevolution.

摘要

This study examines the confounding figure of the dog in modernist literature, science, and philosophy. From the strays roaming the streets of Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses to the highbred subject of Virginia Woolf's Flush, dogs populate a range of modernist texts yet remain notably absent from critical accounts of the period. Addressing this oversight, I argue that dogs play a vital role in modernist reconfigurations of the human and its relationship to animality. The rapid urbanization and industrialization that fueled a crisis of the human subject in the late-19 th and early-20th centuries had a similarly profound impact on man's proverbial best friend, making the dog a potent symbol of the modern condition. My study, though, resists the temptation to read dogs as mere metaphors. Instead, I show how modernists use the figure of the dog to negotiate evolutionary theory's implications for the human. As our coevolutionary partners, dogs reveal the human to be not the self-authored subject of Western humanism but a contingent being shaped by interspecies relations. Examining works by Jack London, Konrad Lorenz, Virginia Woolf, Albert Payson Terhune, J. R. Ackerley, Samuel Beckett, and Emmanuel Levinas, I trace how modernist representations of dogs thus challenge the autonomy of the human subject and the humanist underpinnings of literary forms. Throughout, I show how modernism figures dogs both as instigators of the crisis of the modern subject and as partners uniquely positioned to help the human and its cultural formations adapt to the turbulent and dehumanizing forces of modernity.