Color as a Vital Force: A Posthumanist Approach to the Color Narrative in John Hawkes’ Second Skin
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53469/jtphss.v1i5.77Keywords:
posthumanism, color narrative, zoe non-anthropocentric standpointsAbstract
This paper examines the color in Hawkes’ Second Skin as a subjectivity of zoe that possesses vitality and interacts dynamically with its environment and other entities through the lenses of posthumanism, especially a famous Neterland posthumanities theorist Braidotti’s zoe theory. Color is not a lifeless tool used by authors to embellish the text but an active force that interacts with the characters, predicting or influencing their actions. It guides readers in understanding the plot and themes while fostering an anti-anthropocentric worldview that challenges traditional distinctions between life and non-life. Thus, color in Second Skin embodies Rosi Braidotti’s concept of zoe. This new thinking mode expands human understanding of non-human things and facilitates the construction of non-anthropocentric standpoints.
References
Braidotti, R. “Posthuman Critical Theory.” Journal of Posthuman Studies 1.1(2017): 9 - 25.
---. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019:1.
---. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.
Cantrell, Carol Helmstetter. “John Hawkes’s Second Skin: The Dead Reckoning of a Northrop Frye Romance.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 35.4(1981): 281-290.
Cao, Youping. “A Comparative Analysis of the Metaphorical Cognition of the Basic Color Word ‘Red’ in English and Chinese” Local Governance Research 10 (2008): 79-80.
Chen, Shidan. Postmodernist Fiction. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2013.
Enck, John J. “John Hawkes: An Interview.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 6.2 (1965):141–155.
Greiner, Donald J. “The Thematic Use of Color in John Hawkes’ Second Skin.” Contemporary Literature 11.3 (1970): 389-400.
---. Understanding John Hawkes. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985.
Hawkes, John. Second Skin. New York: New Directions, 1964.
Huang, Hao. Literary Chromatics. Yanji: Yanbian University Press,1990.
Jiang Meiling. “Shivering and Laughing with Tears on the characteristics and significance of John Hawkes’ novels.” MA Thesis. Guangxi Normal University, 2007.
LeClair, Thomas. “The Unreliability of Innocence: John Hawkes’ Second Skin.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 3.1 (1973): 32–39.
Li, Guangyi. Introduction to Science Fiction. Chongqing: Chongqing University Press, 2013.
Michel Foucault. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1971.
Robertson, Mary F. “The ‘Crisis in Comedy’ as a Problem of the Sign: The Example of Hawkes’s Second Skin.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 26.4 (1984):425-454.
Fu, Xiangshu. “Thoughts on Life in Despair: A Preliminary study on John Hawkes’ interpretation of war and death in the novel Second Skin.” Teaching of Forestry Region 2 (2011): 45-46.
Tian, Shishuo. “The Color Narrative in Mo Yan’s Novels.” MA Thesis. Qingdao University, 2023.
Wolfe, Cary. What is posthumanism. Minneapois: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Yang, Jianguo. “Nomadism of Life: An Introduction into Rosi Braidotti’s Posthuman Critical Theory.” Journal of Guangzhou University(Social Science Edition) 22.4 (2023): 66-75.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Rongbing Zhu
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.