Distanțe și interferențe – Ființe umane și animale în literatura română contemporană

Abstract

Animals have been portrayed in world literature, taking various forms: anthropomorphized, through authors' voices conveying moral messages, or as anchors of vulnerability and power. Animals represent more than a human counterpart, since they appertain to an heterogenous category which is an essential part of the world we all find ourselves in creating a web of interdependent existences. Thus, recent theoretical approaches are divided according to the stringent need to reevaluate the relationships between man and animal. In this paper, I will focus on four studies: in Dominance and Affection (1984), Yi Fu Tuan is stressing the unequal connection between domestic animals and their owner; the vulnerability of humans who become prey for animals is described by Val Plumwood in The Eye of the Crocodile (2012); Matthew Calarco’s approach (2015) is inherited in two concepts – ‘identity’ and ‘difference’, that lead to ‘indistinction’, which proposes a greater degree of acknowledgment of the diversity that defines both human and animal worlds; the human condition is questioned by Roberto Marchesini in Over the Human. Post-humanism and the Concept of Animal Epiphany (2017). Therefore, the aim of the paper is the attempt to investigate whether contemporary Romanian literature can be correlated with an animal-oriented approach, by analyzing prose excerpts of writers such as Mircea Cărtărescu, Florin Lăzărescu, Veronica D. Niculescu, and others.