从去人性化角度解读《别让我走》(2)

菜单

1.2 Introduction of Never Let Me Go .. 1

1.3 Introduction of Dehumanization ... 2

1.4 Literature Review ..... 2

2. Dehumanization in Never Let Me Go .. 4

2.1 Dehumanization towards Human Clones .... 4

2.1.1 Clone Children ..... 4

2.1.2 Clone Adults .. 5

2.2 Dehumanization towards Human Beings .... 5

3. The Impact of Dehumanization .... 6

3.1 The Impact on Human Clones 6

3.2 The Impact on Human Beings 6

4. The Enlightenments to Human Beings . 7

Conclusion .. 8

References .. 9
1. Introduction 1.1 Introduction of Kazuo Ishiguro Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. He was born on November 8th in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954. In 1960, at his age of 5, his family moved to England. In 1974, he began his study at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and he graduated in1978 with a Bachelor of Arts (honors) in English and Philosophy. Then he took up further study at the University of East Anglia where he gained a Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 1980. In 1982, he became a British citizen. As an immigrant novelist, Ishiguro has been infusing fresh and new blood into the whole literary world of Britain. Without these immigrant writers, British Literature would appear in no vitality and prosperity and readers could not have read abundant great works with varied styles and decent themes. Ishiguro becomes a famous fiction novelist since the 1980s and is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction writers in the English-speaking world, being celebrated as one of the Three Immigrant Giants with V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. Ishiguro has received four Man Booker Prize nominations and won the prestigious Booker award in 1989 for his novel The Remains of the Day. In 2008, The Times ranked him the 32nd on their list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”. Though he is not a productive writer in quantity, as he only has published six long novels and certain short fictions during the past over 20 years of his writing career, every work of his could be recognized as goods in high quality. Despite his mixed cultural difference of Japan and Britain, he prefers to consider his novels as the carrier of international culture and immerses himself into creating an international literary subject which could mix different nationalities and cultural background together. He insists, “People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else. Temperament, personality, or outlook doesn't pide quite like that. The bits don't separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something that will become more common in the latter part of the century—people with mixed cultural backgrounds, and mixed racial backgrounds. That's the way the world is going.”(Kazuo Ishiguro, 2012) Therefore, he is worldly acknowledged as an international writer. And it is not hard to find that there is always a great span about all of his six novels from subject to content. Till 2005, Kazuo Ishiguro has published six novels and drawn great attention and admiration in the world of literature.
1.2 Introduction of Never Let Me Go It is generally accepted that the 20th century is an era of biotechnology and genetic engineering. In 1953, Watson and Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA, opened the door of molecular biology and laid the foundation of gene technology. Nowadays, genetic engineering techniques have been applied in many fields including research, agriculture, industrial biotechnology, medicine and so on. Indeed, genetic engineering does not normally involve traditional animal and plant breeding. Cloning and stem cell research, closely related to genetic engineering, can be used on a wide range of plants, animals and organisms. In addition, the European Commission has also defined genetic engineering broadly including selective breeding and other means of artificial selection. That is to say, genetic engineering will have revolutionary consequences for mankind in modern times. For a long time, the prosperous development of science and technology is celebrated and favored by not only scientists but also the common people. Science and technology have won unpided admiration by people for that they bring great progress to mankind. And then here even comes a phenomenon that some people worship science and rationalism to a supreme status. However, in recent years, it seems that rationalism and science fail to live up to the high expectation of mankind. Contrary to expectation, scientific progress also brings about an increasingly serious sense of alienation from the self and a stronger attachment to commodity and machine. Among numerous scientific productions, the development of cloning is a controversial issue right from its emergence. In 2000, the British House of Commons in two thirds of the votes to pass a bill, allowing scientists to clone human embryos, “therapeutic cloning” research in order to cultivate fully matched with the patient of human organs, which nearly stretched the nerve to the breaking point for those people against cloning. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro’s sixth novel, came off the press in 2005. On the subject of biotechnology and genetic engineering, which is an exactly controversial topic in the modern 21st century, Never Let Me Go arouses general concern. Set in a fictitious England from 1970s to the late 1990s, it features human clones and is told by the “carer” Cathy who looks back the story that she has experienced with her friends Tommy and Ruth in Hailsham, a boarding school in fictional England. Time magazine names it the best novel of 2005 and includes the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. It also received an ALA Alex Award in 2006. In 2010, a film adaptation, based on this novel and directed by Mark Romanek, was released, which gained much greater popularity. 1.3 Introduction of Dehumanization As an old saying goes, things always reverse themselves after reaching an extreme. Likewise, science and technology has encountered its problems finally after it is fanatically worshipped for such a long time. For example, the most characteristic and boasted achievements of the Western scientific revolution of the 17th century, the industrial revolution of the 19th century have brought many negative effects to the human society, such as environmental pollution, resource poverty and so on. And these problems have been attracting public attention, including Kazuo Ishiguro. He holds the conviction that the whole of modern western development has been a steady descent into nightmare, which makes the evil in human nature to overwhelm the goodness. Progress has been a grotesque and cruel illusion to some extent. For instance, if the cloning technology of human beings is admitted, just like the situation in Never Let Me Go, science and technology will definitely bring about moral or ethical outrage and dehumanization. Nowadays, dehumanization becomes an everyday social phenomenon, rooted in ordinary social-cognitive processes. Dehumanization often takes the form of the denial of full humanness and the cruelty and suffering to others. And it appears in many domains, including ethnicity, race, gender, pornography, disability and technology. Here are two forms of dehumanization. Firstly, it is often accompanied by emotions of contempt and disgust that reflect an implicit vertical comparison and by a tendency to explain behavior in terms of desires and wants rather than cognitive states. Secondly, it is often accompanied by indifference, a lack of empathy, an abstract and deinpiduated view of others that indicates an implicit horizontal separation from self, and a tendency to explain the other’s behavior in unintentional, causal terms. (Nick Haslam, 2006) It is not hard to perceive the worry toward science and technology in Never Let Me Go, a science fiction of clones. In the novel, clones end their lives in a “completion” way on the operating table, just like a lamb to be slaughtered, waiting to be killed with no complains, no struggles. Essentially, it is an act of dehumanization as they human beings treat clones in such a brutal and indifferent way. Human beings commit such crucial treatments to the clones without suffering from conscience, barely for they persuade themselves that the clones are not human, creatures like animals instead. Kazuo Ishiguro reveals the dehumanization of the society. (Wang Hongli, 2011) 1.4 Literature Review