The Vulnerable Animals That Therefore We Are : (Non-)Human Animals in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love

Central to animal studies is the question of words and how they are used in relation to wordless beings such as non-human animals. This issue is addressed by the writer D.H. Lawrence, and the focus of this thesis is the linguistic vulnerability of humans and non-humans in his novel Women in Love, a subject that will be explored with the help of the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s text The Animal That Therefore I Am. The argument is that Women in Love illustrates the human subjection to and constitution in language, which both enables human thinking and restricts the human ability to think without words. This linguistic vulnerability causes a similar vulnerability in non-human animals in two ways. First, humans tend to imagine others, including non-verbal animals, through words, a medium they exist outside of and therefore cannot be defined through. Second, humans are often unperceptive of non-linguistic means of expression and they therefore do not discern what non-human animals may be trying to communicate to them, which often enables humans to justify abuse against non-humans. In addition, the novel shows how this shared but unequal vulnerability can sometimes be dissolved through the likewise shared but equal physical vulnerability of all animals if a human is able to imagine the experiences of a non-human animal through their shared embodiment rather than through human language. Hence the essay shows the importance of recognizing the limitations of language and of being aware of how the symbolizing effect of words influences the human treatment of its others.

Bilingual Lexical Access in Reading : Analyzing the Effect of Semantic Context on Non-Selective Access in Bilingual Memory

Recent empirical studies about the neurological executive nature of reading in bilinguals differ in their evaluations of the degree of selective manifestation in lexical access as implicated by data from early and late reading measures in the eye-tracking paradigm. Currently two scenarios are plausible: (1) Lexical access in reading is fundamentally language non-selective and top-down effects from semantic context can influence the degree of selectivity in lexical access; (2) Cross-lingual lexical activation is actuated via bottom-up processes without being affected by top-down effects from sentence context. In an attempt to test these hypotheses empirically, this study analyzed reader-text events arising when cognate facilitation and semantic constraint interact in a 22 factorially designed experiment tracking the eye movements of 26 Swedish-English bilinguals reading in their L2. Stimulus conditions consisted of high- and low-constraint sentences embedded with either a cognate or a non-cognate control word. The results showed clear signs of cognate facilitation in both early and late reading measures and in either sentence conditions. This evidence in favour of the non-selective hypothesis indicates that the manifestation of non-selective lexical access in reading is not constrained by top-down effects from semantic context.