| Abstract [eng] |
This master’s paper examines the representation of animals in modern Lithuanian prose, focusing on the works of three authors who are close in terms of generation and subject matter: the novella “Dobilė. 1954 metų naktį” by Juozas Aputis, the short story “Gyvulėlių dainavimas” by Romualdas Granauskas, and the novella “Valkata” by Antanas Ramauskas. The aim is to analyse the strategies of literary representation of animals and to find out how the notions of humanity, animality and ethical concern for animals are reflected in the works. The first part of the paper is devoted to a historical overview of the philosophical problem of animality from antiquity to contemporary animal studies. The theoretical framework of the work includes the insights of literary scholar Josephine Donovan, narratologist David Herman, and art critic John Berger, among others, and covers the ethical, literary, and cultural dimensions of animal representation. In the theoretical part, these dimensions are explained by distinguishing three aspects of the literary representation of animals. The notion of the spectrum and degree of reverence defines the objective, metaphorical or subjective status of the animal in the narrative reality and highlights the factors and assumptions behind the change in this status (reverence), while at the same time allowing us to consider the status of the animal as an ethical subject. The aspect of human identity, of becoming through interaction with the animal, is based on the possibilities of self-awareness and moral maturity of human characters in a wider field of beings. The aspect of the animal’s place in the human world includes the impact of social identity, dependency relations and marginalisation mechanisms on human and animal subjects. The analytical part of the paper examines in detail how these aspects are played out in the authors’ works. Aputis’ “Dobilė” explores the interaction between four human and non-human characters – the boy Martynas, his sick mother, a dog and the cow Dobilė. As the story unfolds, Dobilė becomes the axis of Martynas’ moral maturity and subjective reverence. In Granauskas’ “Gyvulėlių dainavimas”, a letter from an elderly woman Kontrimienė to her exiled brother tells the individual and historical story of human and animal communities that have survived trauma. In Ramonas’ “Valkata”, a cat, influenced by the social mechanisms that condition the human world, acquires a social identity and experiences its decline alongside marginal human characters. The paper concludes that animals in these authors’ narratives are treated as characters who exist in the reality of the narrative and who require moral consideration, drawing human characters into a wider community of selves and thus influencing their self-perception. Animals participate significantly in the construction of the text’s meaning and reveal the reciprocal relationship of human cultural ontologies. |
