论文总字数：28874字

摘 要

1. Introduction 1

1.1 Introduction to Jack London 1

1.2 Introduction to White Fang 2

1.3 Historical background 3

2. Literature Review 4

3.Ecological Consciousness in White Fang 6

3.1 Ecological consciousness 6

3.1.1 Definition of the ecological consciousness.............................................6

3.1.2 Development of the ecological consciousness 7

3.2 Embodiment of the ecological consciousness 7

3.2.1 Ecological consciousness of concern.....................................................7

3.2.2 Ecological consciousness of criticism....................................................8

3.2.3 Two different harmonious relationship between man and nature..........9

3.2.4 Environmental determinism..................................................................9

3.3 The relationship between human and nature....................................................10

4. Conclusion...............................................................................................................12

References 13

Acknowledgments

I really want to thank those who have helped and supported me when I was writing this thesis from my heart.

First, I would love to give my heartfelt gratitude to my supervisor, Wang Li, who has offered me constant guidance whether from the beginning of the topic selection or in the process of data collection. Her professional knowledge, rigorous academic attitude, excelsior work style, strict self-discipline and easy-going personality charm has far-reaching impact on me. Therefore, Prof. Wang gave me precious instructions in my studies as well as positive influence on my thought and life.

Next, my gratitude should be given to the professors in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature in Nanjing Tech University. They have shared their academic knowledge, broaden horizon and profound thinking with us, which creates a great academic atmosphere for me, so that my paper could be more rigorous.

Then, I feel like giving my appreciation to my friends accompanying me when I was confronted with barriers in both thesis and life. I enjoy communicating with them and without their help, I couldn't successfully solved all kinds of difficulties in life.

Last but not least, I would like to express my profound love to my family, whose unwavering care and strong support in life contributed a lot to the successful completion of the present paper.

Abstract

Jack London is one of the most famous American writers of the 20th century. He has written many novels and short stories, among which his animal novels are deeply loved by readers at home and abroad. The novel white Fang, which is Jack London's representative animal novels, is also the world literature treasures.

This novel mainly describes that a wolf dog is born in the wild and then brought by the female wolf from the wild world to human life at the age of a few months. As a result of a series of experiences in human life, he eventually is changed from wolf to dog. The three different life experiences also shows the development of ecological consciousness.

Since the industrial revolution in 20th, scientific and technological progress have made our material civilization more prosperous than ever before, and have also enhanced our capacity to transform the environment. At the same time, the relationship between human beings and the environment has been on the slide, giving rise to serious environmental problems and even menacing our existence. With the aggravation of the global ecological crisis, a new kind of ecological value giving expression to the harmonious coexistence between human and nature has appeared. This kind of consciousness pays attention to maintaining the ecological foundation of social development, and emphasizes examining the relationship and purpose between man and nature from the perspective of ecological value.

With the development of the age, people become more and more focused on the ecological problems caused by our society and human survival and development, which can be found in this novel. This paper attempts to analyze and interpret further the profound ecological consciousness reflected in this novel by the combination with the text so that can arouse people's ecological consciousness and make contributions to protect our ecological environment and shared homeland.

Keywords: White Fang; Ecological consciousness; Human and nature

中文摘要

杰克·伦敦是二十世纪初美国著名的作家之一，在世界文坛享有盛誉。他曾写过许多小说和短篇故事，其中他的动物小说深受国内外读者的喜爱。《白牙》这篇小说是杰克·伦敦动物小说中的代表作，也是世界文学宝库中的经典之作。

这篇小说主要描写了一条出生在荒野的混血狼狗，在很小的时候就被它的母亲从荒野世界带回到了人类生活，由于一系列的经历和体验最终由狼变成狗的故事。从这只狗与人类的生活中，我们也可以探索到生态意识的体现与发展。

自工业革命以来，科学技术的快速发展造就了空前的物质文明，也使得人类改造利用环境的能力极大地增强。与此同时,也使得人类与环境的关系日益恶化,给人类的生存带来了巨大挑战。随着当今全球生态环境的日益恶化和生态危机的加剧，一种全新的价值观悄然而生，这种价值观能够体现人与自然环境和谐发展。同时，这种价值观提出我们要重视社会发展的生态基础，从全新的角度去探讨人与自然的关系，其出现与发展为解读文学经典作品提供了新的角度。

随着时代的发展，探讨杰克·伦敦小说中蕴含的对社会，人类的生存和发展等一系列生态问题的深思越来越引起人们的关注。本文试图通过与文本的结合，进一步分析和解读小说中所反映出的深刻的生态意识，进而唤起人们的生态意识，为保护生态环境和人类共同家园做出更多的贡献。

关键词：《白牙》；生态意识；人与自然

1. Introduction

1.1 Introduction to Jack London

Jack London was one of the most distinguished writers in America. He was from the bottom of society, but he worked his way up to the summit of the social hierarchy through arduous work and determined will. As an illegitimate child, London spent his childhood in poverty in the Oakland slums. At the age of 17, he ventured to sea on a sealing ship, from then on, he started his journey. Then he became a sailor. In the journey of sailing, he experienced many difficulties such as severe cold, thunderstorm, and suffering of the severest toil. In the sealing ship, London made a lot of friends from whom he knew some funny or scaring stories, which provided materials for his writing career. But the exhausting sealing life made London feel tired temporarily, so he returned to Oakland continued to study in high school. The year of 1897 saw the movement of gold rush in Canada, and London left college setting out to seek his fortune in Northland. London was always on the rough road of life and experienced the trial and sadness. He had so many experiences, and maybe the most prominent one was his travel in the north, which was thought to be a turning point in his life. Although he didn't get rich as he originally thought, what he brought back with were more precious than gold; all those experience furnished him with considerable amount of sources and materials for his career as a writer. He expressed his fondness on the snowy Northland and it was in the Klondike that he found himself and got his own feeling for nature and life. Drawing upon his adventures in the north, he created some significant works which consisted of short stories and novels set in the north. Stimulated by those experiences, Jack London wrote the call of the wild reaching the peak of his writing career. As a breath of fresh air, his portray of wilderness and frontier life in those novels gave people a new understanding of literature in comparison with nineteenth century Victorian fiction which was often excessively connected with trivial and irrelevant social norms.

1.2 Introduction to White Fang

Among Jack London’s novels, the Call of the Wild and White Fang can be regarded as his representative works that establish his reputation as an outstanding writer. White Fang tells the story of a Wolf called white teeth. He was born in the wild world. All his childhood comply with the law of jungle. Later, his mother took him from the wilderness to her Indian master. The life in the human camp made her character morose and lonely. The sale to Smith added to its cynical character. Abused and monitored by Smith, he became a fierce wolf fighter who was rescued by his new owner, Wieden Scott. His loving kindness transformed white teeth from a ferocious beast into a loyal pet after a near-death experience. He saved the life of his new master's father from the bad guys, earned him the name "lucky wolf", and spent his old age in peace.

In white Fang, through the cultural return, Jack London shows the readers that human beings should give care and respect to life. The great contrast between the perception and understanding of human beings by white teeth and the thinking concepts of human beings at that time was formed, which inspired human beings to re-understand life and nature, and more importantly, to re-understand human beings themselves. White Fang lets human beings know the truth of caring for and respecting ecological nature.

1.3 Historical background

In the 19th century, with the development of capitalist economy, great progress had been made in natural science research. After 1870, various new technologies and inventions emerged one after another and were applied in various industrial production fields to promote the further development of economy.

At that time, the structure of society was made a big difference because the industrial revolution and the rapid economy had created a huge gap between the rich and poor. It has also led to a widening gap between rich and poor. People at the bottom of the society dream of becoming rich and joining the upper class, while the rich are eager to get more

wealth. In this way, everyone has their own beautiful American dream and works hard to realize it.

At the advent of the third great wave of population, the American immigrants found the gold and the adventure traders spread the news of gold discovery to the whole world. In San Francisco , almost all the companies stop their business, the sailors abandoned the ship at the San Francisco bay, soldiers left the camp, the servant left the master, farmers put down their tools, civil servants leave away from the desk, even missionaries left the sermon. Thousands of gold prospectors have sent California's population soaring. And many of the new towns soon became international cities. In 1896, countless American gold prospectors flocked to Alaska, including London and his brother. In this huge gold rush army, only 5,000 people went into the mine and only 1,000 people realized the gold rush dream safe return.

In a word, this gold rush increased social wealth, promoted the development of industry and related industries in California, accelerated the development of agriculture and animal husbandry and drove the development of the transportation industry in the west. However, the rapid development of industrial civilization destroyed the ecology. After that, a concern about future and destiny which is the ecological crisis consciousness began to emerge.

2. Literature Review

So far, a flood of criticism of his works has come out and proliferated. Critics study Jack London’s works from many different perspectives. Some analyze the socialist quality of his works and consider him to be the founder of American proletariat literature, while some scholars mainly focus on the political tendency, even to the aesthetic values in his works, penetrating into the themes, language features, writing techniques and aesthetic thoughts in those works. With the emergence of some new critical approaches in the 20th century, some critics use psychoanalysis criticism, myth and archetypal criticism, feminism to interpret his works. Some critics also notice that in some works of Jack London, there are discrepancies of thoughts that are sometimes confusing and contradictory, so they explain the reasons for the discrepancy. However, the majority of the critics are keen on the naturalistic tendency in London’s fictions, holding that his works often stress sociological and biological determinism.

In china, a few scholars have investigated the ecological view of his works. Yu Mouchang (1935), an ecological historian in China deeply analyzing the meaning of social existence from the perspective of sustainable development and then further indicated that the environmental consciousness was the reflection of the social thoughts, theories, emotions, wills, perceptions and others. All of this is evident in his work on Ecological philosophy. In Bao Qingde's (1960) opinion, the so-called ecological consciousness refers to the continuous actions of human beings and human society on the natural world. For these activities and phenomena, we as the ecological subject, will always make this or that reflection and understanding. The sum of these reflections and perceptions constitutes ecological consciousness.

As Professor Scott slovic (2002), the main creator of the ecocriticism movement in the United States, conveyed his concept of ecological consciousness to the readers with his personal experience of returning to nature in his monograph Leaving to Think. He believes that the ultimate goal of ecological consciousness research is to stimulate people's ecological awareness and actively take some practical actions to participate in

ecological protection. This is the reconstruction of human beings in today's society.

However, researches on the deeper ecological consciousness of the animal novel are relatively few. Thus, it deserves a more systematical and deeper analysis of them from the perspective of ecological consciousness. This paper tries to analyze the novel from the ecological perspective to reveal the ecological consciousness. Ecological consciousness has not been only theoretical but also of great significance to discuss the ecological themes comprehensively, especially in the time when the ecological crisis is more and more serious.

3. Ecological consciousness in White Fang

3.1 Ecological consciousness

The deteriorating ecological environment urgently calls for the improvement of people's ecological consciousness. Ecological consciousness is a new kind of value, which can reflect the harmonious development between human and natural environment. Nowadays, it is also one of the most important symbols of human civilization.

3.1.1 Definition of ecological consciousness

Leopold was the first one to discuss the meaning of ecological consciousness. He pointed out that without ecological consciousness, obligations which does not include self-interest are just empty words in his paper earth ethics in the 1930s. Therefore, the key for us is to extend the social consciousness from human to earth. Here, Leopold compares ecological consciousness to a safeguard of duties which does not include self-interest, hoping to extend the moral and ethical relationship between people to the whole nature. At this time, the ecological consciousness is actually a kind of simple ecological concept, which simply points out that people should treat nature as they treat people. Kirusov, a scholar of the former Soviet Union, was the first one to put forward the point of ecological consciousness normatively. He said that ecological consciousness is the sum of all views, theories and emotions which can reflect the interrelation between society and nature and solve the problem between society and nature optimally according to the specific possibilities of society and nature. In the process of social development, human beings should not only consider the relationship among various factors in the society, but also expand this relationship to the relationship between society and nature.

3.1.2 Development of ecological consciousness

Since the outbreak of the industry revolution in 1760s, man have asked for natural

resource and discharged wastes deliberately in the process of economic development, which affected the ecosystem and even caused the change of the ecological system structure. However, the human response has been slow. Before the 1960s, there was no such thing as environment in American public policy, and even economists avoided talking about the environment.

In 1962, people began to wake up to be conscious of ecological consciousness when Rachel Carson, an American Marine biologist, published her book silent spring. China is even late conscious of the ecological issue. The United Nations conference which is about the human environment was held in America. China also sent a delegation to attend in1972. In August 1973, a national conference on environmental protection was held by the state council. The conference fully revealed the seriousness of environmental pollution and ecological damage in many places, and listed a large number of shocking facts. In September 1979, China's first environmental protection law (for trial implementation) was issued. All these indicate that human society will surely move towards ecological civilization with the emergence and development of ecological consciousness.

3.2 Embodiment of the ecological consciousness

3.2.1 Ecological consciousness of concern

Facing the increasingly serious ecological crisis, human beings have developed a kind of concern about their fate and future, which is called the ecological consciousness of concern. Those activities against the laws of nature, will cause ecological crisis inevitably. If people do not feel the existence of ecological crisis and continue to be blind optimism, this will eventually lead to extinction. In the early industrialization process, the rapid development of industrial civilization caused serious environmental damage. This novel shows us a lot of scenes, including the scenes of mutilating animals and destroying environment and so on, all of which fully expressed the author's ecological consciousness of concern. The dogfighting plot in white Fang fully illustrates the alienation of human nature and the loss of human morality, which is also the writer's ecological consciousness of concern in the face of the distortions of human

nature. The way in which dog-fighting participants entertain themselves by killing one another is the ultimate distortion of human nature. When Smith, the dog fighter, saw that white fang was slow, dull-looking and likely to lose the match, he began to beat white fang, because the failure of white fang to win the match meant Smith's loss of money. The serious worship of money made Smith more materialized and gradually lost his humanity and morality thoroughly. In the industrialized society of the United States, Smith was the representative of human beings with evil thoughts. White Fang reflects the numbness and indifference in the entire American society, and shows the serious ecological crisis.

3.2.2 Ecological consciousness of criticism

In the face of natural and spiritual crises, Jack London does not limit his own level of anxiety to show the crisis, he reaches a higher level of thinking and exploring the root causes of these crises in his novels, which is a reflection of his strong ecological consciousness of criticism. Here, ecological consciousness of criticism refers to the consciousness of human beings to rethink their own thoughts, culture, way of life and mode of civilization development, so as to conduct self-reflection and explore the root causes of ecological deterioration. In this novel, Jack London’s ecological consciousness of criticism is mainly manifested in his criticism of the industrial civilization and the greed of human.

In Jack London’s time, the process of industrialization, human beings have increasingly exploited and oppressed nature, treating nature as a lifeless, worthless and meaningless machine. Besides, nature is only a resource available to man. In the age of industrial civilization, human made full use of science and technology to transform nature. People have no respect for nature. They are on the opposite side of nature. While providing material benefits for human beings, the industrial world is also destroying and threatening human nature, making human beings far away from nature and their own souls. At the same time, mercantilist values also have an impact on human beings and the whole society. The desire for material wealth is also eroding the soul, making the intimate relationship between man and nature disappear. All the things are evidently

depicted in the environmental description.

As for the greed of human, this is especially embodied in the third volume. Smith was just a completely evil master who used white teeth as an outlet for his hatred. In addition, in order to make more money, Smith forces white Fang to fight all kinds of bloody and fierce battles with dogs of all sizes and breeds, which adds more ferocity to his body and then adds to his ferocity in the fight. Under the control of such a monster master, white Fang becomes an extreme demon who blindly hates everything around him. The crazy owner did everything out of his own interest and desire, and white Fang was never showed any care or sympathy, but made full use of the dog to satisfy his own needs, and treated it as if he were possessed by a demon.  

3.2.3 Two different harmonious relationship between man and nature

First, it is a harmonious relationship based on common interests. For this harmony, our reader can see the relationship between the white Fang and its first owner. White teeth pulled the sled for his owner and managed the doggery for him, while his owner provided him with food and shelter and protected it from other humans. However, White Fang has no affection for his master. For white Fang, its owner is a god, but a very fierce god. White Fang is happy to acknowledge his status as master, but it is based on superior intelligence and brute strength. He administered justice with a big stick, maintained discipline with a bitterly hit. The reward was reflected by kindness, but by avoiding from being beaten. The harmony reflected in it is not harmony in fact, because the dignity of white Fang is not respected.

Second, it is a harmonious relationship based on love. Scott is the third owner, and the relationship between them reflects the caring harmony. Scott believes that animals have their own dignity and should be esteemed. He once stood in front of White Fang and said: “poor guy, what he needs is human love.”

3.2.4 Environmental determinism

请支付后下载全文，论文总字数：28874字