رویا یعقوبی

Deontological ethics emphasizes the connection between duty and the morality of human conduct; nevertheless, Mitchell and Ishiguro touch on a different form of duty, which disagrees with the deontological theory and demonstrates that it is in one’s interest. Mitchell in The Bone Clocks suggests that one’s only duty in life is “to survive,” regardless of what may happen to others, but Ishiguro contends in The Buried Giant that failing to fulfill a duty that creates a hardship for others will result in downfall. Despite the differences, they both agree that performing one’s duty is affected by manipulation and deceit. The present article peruses the concept of duty in David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant and Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice provides the framework of the study. Bourdieu believes that accomplishing duty seeks a social strategy to maximize one’s profit; therefore, it can easily become manipulative. The research eventually concludes that fulfilling duty in these novels is an object of manipulation which is esteemed in self-centeredness. Moreover, it delves into the definition of habitus to elucidate that it is facing a transition that is entangled with manipulation.

This article will portray Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) from an Eco-critical viewpoint. The real concern of eco-criticism is to create an eco-literary discourse to produce an interactive approach between the language of nature and the literary language. Likewise, Gregory Garrard explored a different way between humans and environment in the area of cultural spheres in his article in 2016. Garrard wrote a well-known book, Eco-criticism, in 2004 and explored concepts of this approach like: pollution, wilderness, dwelling, animals, and the earth. This type of awareness in literature is significant because of both the current environmental crisis and possible disasters in the future. As such, nature signifies a metaphor for life in the environment. Apart from that, a rural landscape has a profound impact not only on characters, but also on humans the world over. Meanwhile, Atwood followed a creative path which identifies environmental crisis as a modern problem with eccentric human nature as a key element in global ecological concerns. Hence, the main purpose of the current article is looking for a close relationship between humans and nature in the literature which has been ignored in many criticisms.  Finding enough harmony with nature will be a plausible result of it.