英语论文哪里有？本文主要选取库切的三部小说《等待野蛮人》、《耻辱》和《伊丽莎白·科斯特洛：八课》作为主要的文学文本进行分析。由于空间的限制，本文并没有对库切的所有作品进行考察。然而，作为一位多产的作家，库切关于动物伦理的作品并不局限于这三部小说。对库切关于动物和人类之间伦理关系的作品进行全景式研究是值得进一步研究的。
Chapter 1 Empathy Failure in Anthropocentric Human-Animal Ethical Relation
1.1 Rationalization of Animal Slaughtering
Animal slaughtering constantly concerns Coetzee in his literary writing as well as in his public engagement, as his attempt to probe into the human-animal relation. Coetzee points out that the abnormal relation manifests itself in the cruel industry of animal farming which turns animal lives into food for people (Kannemeyer 2017: 598-599). Depicting the suffering of animals and the cruelty of human beings, Coetzee reveals the empathy failure of human beings that lies behind their perpetration and indifference. By finding out that the standard of species degrading animals to inferior status, he questions the rationalization of animal slaughtering based on anthropocentric discourse, and seeks the possibility of human beings to make a change in human-animal ethical relation.
Coetzee considers animal slaughtering as the most deficiency in the human-animal relation. In the public, he remains active in an Australian animal rights protection organization called Voiceless, to promote human awareness of animals’ tough situation and advocate people’s respect and compassion for animals (Kannemeyer 2017: 598). In the speech titled “I Feel Therefore I Am” written for Voiceless, Coetzee aims to rail against the modern animal husbandry industry. He notes, among the “long list of the ways in which our relations to animals are wrong, but the food industry, which turns living animals into what it euphemistically calls animal products—animal products and animal by-products—dwarfs all others in the number of individual animals lives it affects” (2007). By his statement Coetzee suggests that, with more efficient and industrial methods of production, human beings conduct a larger scale of animal killing. Therefore, the modern industrialized animal farm deteriorates the relation between human beings and animals.
Chapter 2 Sympathy for Animal Other Aspired in Human-Animal Ethical Relation
2.1 Sympathy through Empathic Experience of Animal Other’s Body Pain
The body is the most instinctive, immediate, and directly perceived form of one’s being. In his novels, Coetzee stages the animal body to present the sentient being of animals, dispelling the mind-body dichotomy that degrades animals. The body pain of animals is juxtaposed with that of human beings, to reveal their identical sensation of pain. By doing so, Coetzee bridges the connection between humans and non-human animals. Through the empathic experience of animal other’s body pain, human beings get to understand the animal suffering and genuinely sympathize.
Coetzee lays stress on the animal body in his works because he believes that the body features the embodied and sentiment being of animals. In his letter written to Paul Auster, Coetzee writes: “I’ve always found it interesting that whereas we human beings think of our bodies as having parts—arms, legs and so forth—animals don’t. In fact, I doubt that animals think of themselves as ‘having’ bodies at all. They just are their bodies” (2013: 242). This implies two implications. On the one hand, different from human beings, the nature of animal existence lies in their lively body, instead of consciousness. Although animals are unaware of their body parts, their body signifies their holistic being, or what Costello suggests, “fullness, embodiedness” of being (Coetzee 1999b: 33). On the other hand, Coetzee’s letter signifies the purity of the animal being, which most human beings cannot attain for their emphasis on the superiority of reason over sensation, and the consequent fragmentation within and alienation from themselves.
Chapter 3 Empathy with Animal Other in Idealized Human-Animal Ethical Relation
3.1 Writers’ Empathy with Animal Other in Literary Writing
This empathic capacity of sharing the other’s being is practiced in Coetzee’s literary writing, by Coetzee himself and his female narrator, the fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello created by him. Writers employ sympathetic imagination and enable empathy to flourish in two aspects. On one hand, writing itself is an empathic act to exercise sympathetic imagination of animal other and understand animal other’s being. On the other hand, empathy serves to extend moral engagement in human-animal ethical relation.
Coetzee is well aware of the difficulty of empathizing with animals. When receiving an interview from Satya magazine, Coetzee indicates the difficulty of taking the perspective of animal consciousness. He notes that “there is a strong argument to be made that it is impossible for a human being to inhabit the consciousness of an animal because the mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from that of human beings” (Coetzee 2004). In fact, Coetzee rejects the notion of animal consciousness or mind, as it would risk falling into the trap of Descartesian mind-body dichotomy and anthropocentrism which relegate animals to subsidiary status. The discussion on the difficulty of empathizing with animals is carried out as far back as Coetzee’s Tanner lectures. In the lecture, the narration of Costello refutes against Thomas Nagel’s famous article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat”. According to Nagel, given that bats are mammals and vertebrates as human beings are, they are more closely related to human beings than the other species. Nevertheless, they still act so differently from human beings and possess a sensory apparatus so alien from ours that makes it difficult to understand, such as their “flying around at night catching insects in the mouth”, “navigating by sound instead of sight”, and “days hanging upside down” (Nagel 1979: 439). Therefore, imagining what their experiences are like is an exceptionally challenging rhetorical question.
3.2 Protagonists’ Empathy with Animal Other by Ethical Engagement
Empathy is an essential path leading to human beings’ ethical engagement, while ethical engagement, in turn, fosters the capacity of empathy. In his fictional works, Coetzee shows how the protagonists’ ethical engagement leads to their empathic awakening with the animal other. In Barbarians and Disgrace, the protagonists similarly involve in ethical engagement with animals, and ultimately empathize with the animal other through imagination.
At the beginning of Barbarians, the magistrate holds an indifferent attitude towards the other’s suffering. He once lives a life of moral apathy and lazy indifference before the campaign against the barbarians begins, and talks easily about hunting which he enjoys. For him, hunting is a suitable subject, on the same level as “horses, hunting, the weather” (Coetzee 1980: 71). When Joll mentions his last hunting experience in which “thousands of deer, pigs, bears were slain” (ibid: 4), the magistrate chillingly states, “[w]hich was a pity”. What he feels sorry for is the food wasted, rather than has compassion for the tragic massacre of so many animal lives. His indifference also lies in his attitude towards the suffering of animalized barbarians, who are relegated as “lazy, immortal, filthy, stupid” by the settlers’ litany of prejudice. When soldiers torment the prisoners, although the magistrate can hear the screaming and groan from granary at midnight, he turns a blind eye to the suffering of barbarians. He indeed feels guilty of simply looking on and doing nothing, and realizes “how tiny his world has been allowed to make”, “how daily (he) becomes more like a beast or a simple machine” (ibid: 114), a beast alienated by cold civilization system of the Empire.
Conclusion
Major Findings
This thesis carries out a textual analysis of Coetzee’s works based on the theory of empathy, and aims to explore the role of empathy in human-animal ethical relation in Coetzee’s works. Based on the interrelation of empathy, sympathy and sympathetic imagination, this thesis draws that a leap of empathy is what Coetzee seeks for a better human-animal ethical relation in his works and in reality.
Firstly, in the anthropocentric human-animal ethical relation, empathy failure is manifest in rationalizing animal suffering in three aspects, rationalization of animal slaughtering, rationalization of animal instrumentalization, and rationalization of animal silence. Rationalization of animal slaughtering is supported by speciesism, which relegates animals to inferior species. Coetzee reveals that empathy failure leads to humans’ exploitation of animals and indifference towards animal slaughtering. Rationalization of animal instrumentalization is based on human reason, which defines non-thinking animals. Coetzee refutes the rationalist view of animals, and criticizes the extreme development of instrumental reason. Rationalization of animal silence is based on language, which deprives animals of their natural voice. Coetzee reveals that empathy failure lies in marginalization of animal voice and incapability of empathic listening. Through probing into various forms of animal suffering, Coetzee deals with the problem of empathy failure in human-animal ethical relation, and attributes anthropocentrism as the root cause that justifies human violence.
Secondly, human beings’ sympathy for the animal other is aroused through three aspects, including empathic experience of animal other’s body pain, empathic encounter with animal other’s gaze, and empathic understanding of animal other’s being. In the first place, Coetzee’s emphasis on animal body pain suggests their embodied, full, and joyful integrity. In Coetzee’s juxtaposition of human and animal suffering, the empathic experience of animal other’s body pain enables characters to realize their identical perception to pain and death, and genuinely sympathize for the animal suffering. In the second place, the gaze of suffering animal presents its vulnerability and challenges human superiority, and appeals to human beings. Sympathy is aroused as an ethical response to animal gaze. Encountering with animal gaze, the characters David Lurie and the magistrate sympathize with animals, and make their moral choice.
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