De-Metaphorizing and Becoming Animal: When the Animal Looks Back. A Reading of Marian Engel's Bear (Texto en Ingles) (Ensayo Critico‪)‬

Introduction The primacy acquired by nature in the culture of our times has brought to the fore several issues which are not strictly connected with an immediate and 'purely' ecological interest. It is not only a question of invalidating the Cartesian dualism, which has deeply influenced the modern perception of the world, with a view to fostering, broadly speaking, a new 'ecological sensibility'. There is also, indeed, a wholly post-modern theoretical emphasis on how "relations to the non-human world are always historically mediated" (SOPER, 1995, p. 4) and thus on how our culture has developed its tools to build and classify the animal world, 'semanticizing' it in its relationship with the human one.