Chiens sentients : du langage émotif au discours critique

Abstract

If sentience refers to consciousness, to the ability to be affected by various experiences or multiple perceptions of the surrounding universe, to the reaction to a given stimulus and to physical and psychological sensations, dogs have a special place among sentient animals. In fact, humans and dogs tame each other, through co-learning, through emotional language and critical discourse. By revisiting the existential journey of three stray dogs (Flush, Mr. Bones and Cross) and three returning dogs (Kurika, Hachi and Bailey), coming from a corpus of litterary and cinematographic works, we can see the degree of their sentience, the representativeness of the narrator (human and canine), the functional and emotional unity of the human and non-human protagonist and the equality of a sentient dog in relation to a man conscious of his sentience.

Keywords

• sentience
• dog
• language
• emotion
• criticism
• anthropodenial