버지니아 울프의 비인간 등장인물과 포스트휴머니즘

Virginia Woolf’s Non-human Characters and Posthumanism

Engaging Virginia Woolf’s short fiction “Kew Gardens” and her canine biography Flush as the important texts by which to study the narrative status of non-human characters, this paper aims to investigate possibilities and limitations in representing the subjectivities of non-human characters such as snail and Cocker Spaniel. Posthumanist theories will require close attention in research on how to represent the subjectivity of other species in human language. First, I will focus on comparative analysis of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s becoming-animal and Donna Haraway’s becoming-with. Second, through the conceptual understanding of transdisciplinarity of Cary Wolfe’s, I will explain the significance of reading Woolf’s modernist narrative from Posthumanist perspective. Lastly, I will evaluate the potentiality of Woolf’s non-human characters in terms of a challenge to anthropocentric conceptualizations. Woolf anthropomorphizes the snail as an agency with her imaginative becoming-with. Flush, the canine protagonist is also anthropomorphized to validate the relationship of companion species. Woolf’s non-human characters become with the human characters and in the narrative space, once decentered, the human is relocated.