English 210 - Winter, 2013

Readings in English and American Literature

Topic: Thinking With Animals

Class Information

Instructor: Roy, Parama
CRN: 73747
Time: R 3:10-6:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Later British
Focus: ID, Interdiscipline, Theory

Description

As is clear from the abundance of work in the field of animal studies since the late twentieth century, animals are good to think (with). The “animal turn” in the humanities had its origins in part in the animal liberation movement in Europe and North America, which sought to investigate the ethics of human co-existence with non-human animals and to expand the idea of rights beyond the limits of the human. At the same time cultural critics and philosophers (especially in the Continental tradition) have been profoundly interested in the representation of non-human animals and ecologies, and the questions animals raise about identity, identification, autonomy, difference, and agency. While this course, designed as an introduction to the question of the animal in modern (western) culture, hopes to cover both of these major modes of thinking about animality, it will privilege the Continental strain.

What is it that we call an animal, and how might we understand the relation between humans and nonhuman animals? What is the nature of animal consciousness (including self-consciousness), communication, and affect? What (and how) do animals know, and what (and how) can they learn? Is there an animal politics, and can animals be subject to law? Can animals experience death? Do (at least some) animals deserve the moral and legal considerations presently reserved for human persons? What is the nature of human obligation with respect to nonhuman life, even if such life is not the subject of rights? How do we understand animality with respect to categories of identity such as gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability, and can we think of speciesism as analogous to slavery, colonisation, or genocide? How have animals been used in the rhetoric (and practice) of the dehumanisation of slaves, women, Jews? These are some of the questions that the theoretical readings will pose for us.

Literature has always sought to address the relationship between humans and other animals, and to imagine animal experience and thought. We will read a handful of literary texts that treat of animal and human incarnation (including what it might mean to have and to use eyes and noses, faces, hands, carapaces, and tails); animal-human transformation; wildness, settlement, and domestication; and animal speech, death, and sacrifice.

In addition to the texts listed below, we will read essays, poetry, and fiction by Aesop, La Fontaine, Montaigne, Descartes, Bentham, Kipling, Angela Carter, Ted Hughes, Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Martha Nussbaum, Carol Adams, Thomas Nagel, Laurie Shannon, David L. Clark, Akira Lippit, and Temple Grandin.



Grading

Weekly posts to an online discussion forum; a keywords project or an annotated bibliography; a 17-20 page seminar paper.

Texts

The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. Patrick Parrinder, H.G. Wells
Animal Philosophy, Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco, ed.
gulliver\'s travels: a norton critical edition, ed. Albert Rivero, Jonathan Swift
The Animal That Therefore I Am , Jacques Derrida
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
When Species Meet, Donna Haraway
The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben
"Becoming-Animal", Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
The Lives of Animals, J.M. Coetzee
Introduction, Animal Rites; “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion”; “Before the Law”; “Human, All Too Human”, Cary Wolfe