Date of Award

2019

Publisher

North Dakota State University

Document Type

Master's Paper

Degree Awarded

Master of Arts (MA)

Program

English

Department

English

College

Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

Faculty Advisor

Maylath, Bruce

Description

Richard Adams’ Watership Down provides readers a unique view of a world that is and isn’t their own, a familiar space from the unfamiliar perspective of an animal. Animal narratives like these are at the core of Animal Studies, a school of thought intent on decentering the Anthropos; yet despite this goal, our explorations of these text still must contend with the fact that they are bound to a language incapable of transmitting their experience and a human-privileged system of value still based within the human frame of reference. By viewing Adams’ novel as a case study for anthropomorphized texts not as problematic human texts with animal teachers but as animal texts in translation, we can use the principles of translation studies, content analysis, and animal science to shed new light on how we depict animal culture while encouraging a learning-driven empathy for the animal experience in the human reader.

Rights

NDSU Policy 190.6.2

Rights Link

https://www.ndsu.edu/fileadmin/policy/190.pdf

Handle Identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/10365/29759

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