M.A. (English) / Yann Martel’s Life of Pi takes as its focal point a deeply traumatic event that befalls its main protagonist, Pi Patel. One effect of Pi’s traumatic experience is that it hinders his ability fully to communicate the scope and detail of his suffering. This dissertation seeks to show how, through a deftly woven, framed narrative, the use of the mode of the fantastic and an ambiguous allegory, the novel works creatively to confront the difficulties inherent in the representation of Pi’s trauma. The central tenets of trauma theory offer illuminating perspectives from which to examine the manifestation of trauma in this novel. The framed narrative, when considered within the context of Jacques Derrida’s description of the performance of the frame in The Truth in Painting, is a performance that suggests possibilities for the figurative representation of Pi’s trauma. The framed narrative engenders a profound sense of ambiguity within the text, which is necessary for the fantastic to function. The fantastic, in this novel, resonates with the experience of trauma and displays significant potential in the saying of the unsaid. Ambiguity also permeates the double narrative presented toward the close of the narrative. The double narrative is an allegory, but not a straightforward one and its unorthodox implementation is best understood in the context of the deconstructive possibilities of allegory as delineated by Paul de Man.

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自2000年「韓流」席捲整個亞洲之後，電影製作/影視製作就成為熱門的城市行銷手法，透過電影拍攝，不但可以將城市意象傳播至世界，也可以提升地方產業的發展。在這樣的潮流下，臺中市政府更邀請李安導演及國際劇組來臺拍攝「少年PI的奇幻漂流」，透過影片的拍攝及播送進一步行銷城市。然而，一般討論電影製作以及城市行銷間的關係時，多數會將焦點放在「影視觀光」以及「地方行銷」上；而「少年PI的奇幻漂流」這樣一部在臺中拍攝但完全沒有任何臺中場景的電影，卻讓臺中市與這部電影產生了緊密的聯結，也在李安導演獲獎無數後，讓臺中受到了許多國際媒體的關注。簡而言之，「少年PI的奇幻漂流」是一個不靠電影場景置入而成功達到城市行銷目標的個案，但臺中市政府如何透過鼓勵影視產業發展達成城市行銷目的？本研究即著重於探討臺中市政府在此個案上所採取的各項策略。 / Since 2000, the craze of “Korean Wave” has overwhelmingly swept across Asia, filmmaking became a popular city marketing approach to broadcast and transmit the city image to the world, also to promote the local industry development. Following this trend, Taichung City Government seized the opportunity to invite and cooperate with Ang Lee and the production group of “Life of Pi” since 2010 to 2013 to market the city. However, when discussing promoting filming activities as one of the strategies to reach the city marketing goal, most of the perspectives and literatures were focusing on film tourism or place marketing. That means, most of the city marketers focus more on whether the sceneries of the target city are broadcasting through the films or not. By contract, “Life of Pi” is the film which produced and shoot in Taichung but none of the sceneries from Taichung City were disclosed in the story. Nevertheless, the film and Ang Lee had indeed linked the international media exposure and attention to Taichung City while they won numbers of film awards included the Academy Awards. To put it more specifically, this is the case which successfully reached the city marketing goal without manipulating any “product-placement” strategy. But what did the city government do to reach the goal? This research aims at analyzing the strategies which Taichung City Government took by coordinating and supporting “Life of Pi” to reach the city marketing goal.

This essay explores the application of zoomorphism and anthropomorphism in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. The novel, rather than being a mere shipwreck-narrative or a miraculous tale with religious overtones, is also a story about the complicated and perhaps inevitably divided relationship between humans and animals. This essay introduces the fields of ecocriticism and animal studies and defines anthropomorphism and zoomorphism in the context of literary criticism. The essay goes on to discuss the layers of meaning behind the names and naming of the two main characters using Burke’s rhetoric of identification, analyses the anthropomorphism and religiosity in the novel’s two stories, and analyses the two accepted readings of the novel from a zoomorphic perspective. The essay looks at the human-animal divide and its problems in literature, going into Derrida’s animal philosophy to provide a counterpoint to a view derived from Cartesian dualism. In a straight reading of the novel, the first story is regarded as metaphoric while the second story is regarded as literal. There is an alternative reading where it is left to the reader to decide which story is true, but this essay argues that this reading negates a metaphoric interpretation of either story and therefore dismisses the straight reading. Instead, this essay proposes a third, zoomorphic reading, fully compatible with the straight reading, where anthropomorphism is employed to externalize human actions onto animals, but where zoomorphism is employed to project animals onto humans in order to externalize their cannibalism. In the zoomorphic reading, both stories are interpreted as vehicles of projection while avoiding the logical pitfall of the alternative reading.

本論文旨在重新思考人與動物之間的倫理關係，企圖擺脫西方哲學傳統之下人類中心的立場。透過哈洛威《同伴物種宣言》與《當物種相遇》中同伴物種的概念來閱讀馬泰爾的《少年Pi的奇幻漂流》，這樣的倫理關係得以透過建基於「關係性」上而實現，而非以西方哲學傳統下的人／動物之二元對立為基礎。在這樣的倫理關係中，人與動物在會面時透過「回視」達到溝通。也在會面中，人與動物與彼此「成為共在」，並且共同形塑彼此的主體性。此外，《少年Pi的奇幻漂流》中可見擬人化的口吻敘述老虎理查‧帕克的故事，本文將解釋在這種擬人化中可以看見同伴物種倫理的實踐。 本論文由五個章節組成。第一章包含《少年Pi的奇幻漂流》相關評論，並回顧西方哲學傳統之下人與動物的關係。第二章意圖闡明在哈洛威脈絡之中同伴物種的概念，尤其是「關係性」和「成為共在」。透過檢視Pi和理查‧帕克在救生船上的種種細節，本文認為Pi和理查‧帕克的關係可被視為同伴物種的關係。第三章聚焦在「回視」的動作，作為同伴物種間建立雙向溝通的方式。本文也將透過「回視」深入分析Pi和理查‧帕克溝通上的（不）可能性。第四章將《少年Pi的奇幻漂流》中兩個版本的故事讀為兩種動物敘事的並置。兩者皆從擬人化的角度去敘事，但是其中一個版本透露出同伴物種倫理的實踐，另一個版本則回歸到傳統人類中心式的解讀。第五章為本文之總結，主張蘊含同伴物種倫理的動物敘事能夠幫助我們理解如何透過關注生活中真實存在的動物去重新思考人與動物之間的關係。 / The thesis aims to rethink an ethical relationship between humans and animals that is separated from the anthropocentric stance in the Western philosophical traditions. Reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi in light of the ethics of companion species in Donna Haraway’s The Companion Manifesto and When Species Meet, I would like to contend that this ethical relationship take shape while it is founded on relationality, instead of the human/animal dichotomy. Acts of respect need to be exerted by human and animal participants when they meet. And in the meeting, they become with each other in the relationship in which their subjectivities are co-constituted by each other. The narrative of Pi living with Richard Parker employs a kind of anthropomorphism endowed with ethics of companion species. This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is a review of research on criticism of Life of Pi and discussions of human/animal relationships in the Western philosophical framework. Chapter Two aims to elucidate the concepts of companion species in Haraway’s context, including relationality and becoming-with. By examining the details in Pi and Richard Parker’s life on the lifeboat, I argue that they are in a companion-species relationship. Chapter Three focuses on the act of respect, the practice for the companion species to evoke mutual responses. The (im)possible communication between Pi and Richard Parker will be analyzed. Chapter Four reads the two versions of the story of Life of Pi as a juxtaposition of two kinds of animal narratives. Both told from anthropomorphic perspective, the story with the animals is registered with ethics of companion species while the story without animal returns to the traditional anthropocentric interpretation. Finally in Chapter Five, I conclude that animal narrative that is entailed with ethics of companion species enables us to rethink the human/animal relationship by attending to real animals which are physically beside us.

Generic transformation of the castaway novel is made evident by the various ways in which the narrative boundaries that separate fiction from reality and history, the past from the present, and the rational from the irrational, are reconfigured in Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before (1994), J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2002). The dissolution of boundaries reflects the dominant shift that has occurred in the castaway novel from the 18th century literary context to the present postmodern, postcolonial context. In this regard, the narrative utilizes various narratological strategies, the most significant being intertextuality, metafiction, historiographical metafiction, allegory, irony, and the carnivalesque. These narratological strategies rewrite, revise, and recontextualize those generic conventions that perpetuated the culture of masculinity and conquest that defines colonialism and the traditional castaway novel epitomized by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). From a postcolonial perspective, the castaway’s state of being reflects on the condition of the colonized as well as the colonizer: his/her experience of displacement is similar to colonized peoples’ separation from their cultural, spiritual and personal identities; simultaneously, processes of appropriation, adaptation and control of space resemble colonization, thereby revealing the constructed nature of colonial space. As such, space is fundamental to individual orientation and social adaptation and consequently, metaphorically and metonymically linked to identity. In the selected postmodernist and postcolonial texts, the movement from the position of castaway to colonist as originally manifested in Robinson Crusoe is therefore reinterpreted and recontextualized. The postmodernist and postcolonial contexts resist fixed and one-dimensional representations of identity, as well as the appropriation and domination of space, that characterize shipwreck literature from pre-colonial and colonial periods. Rationalist notions of history, reality and truth as empirically definable concepts are also contested. The castaway identity is often characterized by feelings of physical and spiritual displacement and estrangement that can be paralleled to postmodernist themes of existential confusion and anxiety. / Thesis (PhD (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013

Generic transformation of the castaway novel is made evident by the various ways in which the narrative boundaries that separate fiction from reality and history, the past from the present, and the rational from the irrational, are reconfigured in Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before (1994), J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2002). The dissolution of boundaries reflects the dominant shift that has occurred in the castaway novel from the 18th century literary context to the present postmodern, postcolonial context. In this regard, the narrative utilizes various narratological strategies, the most significant being intertextuality, metafiction, historiographical metafiction, allegory, irony, and the carnivalesque. These narratological strategies rewrite, revise, and recontextualize those generic conventions that perpetuated the culture of masculinity and conquest that defines colonialism and the traditional castaway novel epitomized by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). From a postcolonial perspective, the castaway’s state of being reflects on the condition of the colonized as well as the colonizer: his/her experience of displacement is similar to colonized peoples’ separation from their cultural, spiritual and personal identities; simultaneously, processes of appropriation, adaptation and control of space resemble colonization, thereby revealing the constructed nature of colonial space. As such, space is fundamental to individual orientation and social adaptation and consequently, metaphorically and metonymically linked to identity. In the selected postmodernist and postcolonial texts, the movement from the position of castaway to colonist as originally manifested in Robinson Crusoe is therefore reinterpreted and recontextualized. The postmodernist and postcolonial contexts resist fixed and one-dimensional representations of identity, as well as the appropriation and domination of space, that characterize shipwreck literature from pre-colonial and colonial periods. Rationalist notions of history, reality and truth as empirically definable concepts are also contested. The castaway identity is often characterized by feelings of physical and spiritual displacement and estrangement that can be paralleled to postmodernist themes of existential confusion and anxiety. / Thesis (PhD (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013