بهزاد برکت

Ecocriticism as a field of study into the state of both human and non-human entities in an act of colonization. As such three of its most important concepts, Agency, Development and Displacement, are discussed to facilitate the understanding of this approach for the readers. Non-human agency advocates against a human-centric agency and for a dynamic relationship between human and non-human agency instead. As often witnessed in the aftermath of natural disasters such as an earthquake, natural events are unpredictable and not all in control of human beings. Then it can be stated that humans are not the only active agents in the environment but that instead we need to study the dynamic relationship between human and non-human agencies. The second concept, Development, is a bridge between colonialism and non-human agency, which entails the process of changing an environment in course of monopolizing certain products in a colonized country. Such changes usually have negative effects on the natives’ lives, such as losing their jobs, homes and impoverishment. This then leads to their displacement, seeking a new area where they can find new resources to survive and build their lives around. This is then a chained set of events as explained in the article, from the promise of a development that is in truth monopolizing one or more products, to the displacement of the natives from their homes and their struggle to survive.

This study offers a re-reading of Ken Kesey’s oeuvre, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, employing Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotics of Face and their concept of regime of signs; it tries to map the workings of Face as an impersonal despotic system that emerges from the mixture of two regimes of signs that facilitates surveillance, discrimination and control. It also pinpoints the potentiality and activities of escape from this system, and the emergence of signs of disruptive faciality. Analyzing the facial activities of three characters in the novel, namely, Nurse Ratched, Chief Bromden and Randel McMurphy, the study elaborates on the following facial aspects: the State’s policies of facialization in Nurse Ratched; the schizoid experience of faciality in Chief Bromden and the suspense of the face system in McMurphy. Besides the produced mappings, the reader also meets a set of newly conceptualized functionalities of faces, contributed by the particular signs this context provides, namely, the catatonic face, the synaptic face and the carnivalesque faces.