Browsing by Subject "ihmiskeskeisyys"

This thesis takes an ecocritical perspective, reading Christine Carbo’s The Wild Inside (2015) and Charlotte McConaghy’s Once There Were Wolves (2021) as narratives that criticise anthropocentricism, or human exceptionalism, and raise environmental questions and concerns. Both are crime novels with human violence as a distinct theme, have clear ecological themes, and feature wildlife in contact with humans. This amounts to the novels putting forward pointedly violent and abusive portrayals of humans, which highlights animals and nature as being ultimately subject to human power. The way that these works present anthropocentricism as a problematic worldview is examined through the topics of human separation from nature, the complex issue of wildness and the human need to manage it, and empathy as a reflective process and potential motivational force. These issues are addressed using the frameworks of ecocriticism, animal studies, and empathy studies. The ideas and terms from research by Elisa Aaltola (2018; 2023) and by Lori Gruen (2015; 2018) in animal studies and empathy studies become especially central in the discussion on anthropocentricism and human–animal separation, making it clear that animal interests, along with environmental concerns, are at the core of these novels. The shared interest of ecocriticism and narrative empathy about the power that narratives can have on attitudes and potentially on real-world action is also a crucial part of the study, discussed using the works of Greg Garrard (2023) and Suzanne Keen (2006; 2007). The narrative similarities that are relevant to examining how Carbo’s and McConaghy’s novels approach ecological topics and present anthropocentrism as a problematic worldview also feature in this discussion: the first-person character narrators let the reader see the narrators’ thoughts and feelings, asking the reader to think about ecological issues, and enable sympathetic depictions of wildlife. Similarities in characterisation between the two novels, on the other hand, portray humans as violent and destructive, in contrast to the wildlife, grizzly bears and grey wolves, whose lives are in the stories put at risk for human needs.