Naslov
Animals on Trial in Julian Barnes' 'The Wars of Religion.

Autori
Willems, Brian Daniel

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Poglavlja u knjigama, znanstveni

Knjiga
Reconsidering Conventions: Essays on Language and Literature

Urednik/ci
Knežević, Marija ; Nikčević-Batrićević, Aleksandra

Grad
Nikšić

Godina
2009

Raspon stranica
221-235

ISBN
978-86-7798-036-8

Ključne riječi
animals, territory, animal punishment, deterritorialization, Julian Barnes

Sažetak
British writer Julian Barnes' story "The Wars of Religion" (1989) describes the trial and sentencing of a family of woodworms in 16th century France. The animals are charged with destroying the legs of a bishop's wood throne, causing the sitter to topple over into senility. This paper focuses on the sentenced pronounced at the end of the woodworms' trial: banishment from the church in which they were found to the territory of a nearby field. This sentencing is compared with the sentencing from a 1587 weevil trial, as reported in E.P Evans' The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), on which the story was based. This comparison raises a number of questions regarding the borders between humans and non-humans: Is there a way to rethink the Greek division of life into zoē and bios? Is there a manner in which humanity can participate in a non-human concept of the territory? These questions are developed through Jean Baudrillard's claims that the animal has such a rooted relationship to the territory that it cannot offer the emancipatory potential claimed by Deleuze and Guattari through their concepts of deterritorialization and becoming- other. However, a closer reading of Deleuze and Guattari shows that it is exactly this rootedness which offers the potential for crossing borders. These theoretical considerations are important for "The Wars of Religion" because Barnes' story seems locked on one side of the human-animal border while the 1587 sentencing offers a greater attempt to experience a more rooted and therefore emancipatory relationship to the territory.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

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