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”Animals, framed either individually, or as a collective identity, are the others against which humanity measures itself.” (T.C. Baker, Writing Animals: Language, Suffering and Animality in Twenty-First Century Fiction (2019), p.1)
Animals are omnipresent in literary and cultural texts: From children’s books and Disney films to horror films, wildlife documentaries, or recent hit tv-shows like Netflix’s Tiger King (2020), the representations of animals are manifold. They are, however, almost always put into relation with humans and often this relationship serves to define the human and to mark us as different from the animal. (Literary) Animal Studies investigates the social, cultural, economic and political interconnectedness of the categories of the human and the animal. Related to the philosophical discourse of animal rights and animal welfare, literary Animal Studies questions the binary of the human and the non-human/animal/other.
In this course, we are going to read two texts through the lens of literary Animal Studies: Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1894/5), a canonical work of late 19th-century British (children’s) fiction, and Aminatta Forna’s Happiness (2019), a 21st-century novel about human-animal coexistence in urban spaces. We will explore the role of anthropomorphism in these texts and look at how they challenge or cement anthropocentrism, how they blur human-animal boundaries, and in how far they present analogies between speciesism and racism.
The first part of the course will be taught online, and the second part will be taught en bloc on two Saturdays in June: June 5 and June 19. You must attend both the online sessions and the classroom sessions, complete written assignments, and submit a term paper in order to get credit for this course.
Texts:
Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Books. Ed. W.W. Robson. OUP, 2008.
ISBN-10: 9780199536450 / ISBN-13: 978-0199536450
Forna, Aminatta. Happiness. Bloomsbury, 2019.
ISBN-10: 1408893282 / ISBN-13: 978-1408893289 |
