English 607.42/517.58 The Human and its Others: The Question of the Animal
Instructor: Pamela Banting
Course Description
Over about the past fifteen years there has been an outpouring of scholarship devoted to the subject of the Other. Yet so far scant critical or theoretical attention has been turned specifically to question of the animal Other. Animals figure prominently in an extraordinarily wide range of texts and genres: oral stories both aboriginal and non-aboriginal, myths, natural history, spiritual literature, philosophy, yoga manuals (e.g. downward-facing dog etc.), hunting and sporting narratives, explorers' journals, biology textbooks, first-person adventure narratives, field guides, jokes, children's books, cookbooks, didactic materials, fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction. They are also represented in other kinds of cultural ‘texts' such as nature documentaries, movies, videos, animation, zoos, circuses, rodeos, pet competitions, art exhibits including performance art, and cartoons, to list just a few. Animals, wrote Claude Levi-Strauss, are good to think with.
In this seminar we will begin to think with animals first and foremost by considering them in their Otherness. Beginning with a brief investigation into poststructuralist, postmodern, postcolonial, feminist, and ecocritical interrogations of Otherness and the ethics of representation, we will examine the humanist bias and the blind spots regarding the animal in existing theories of the Other. Then we will interrogate theorizations of the animal in relation to the question of language. One of the traditional demarcations between humans and other animals has been the notion that humans are the only ones capable of language and that this trait sets us above other species. Research in zoosemiotics and the long-term studies of naturalists, however, challenge this proprietorial exclusivity, and deep ecologists like Christopher Manes question why we privilege language over photosynthesis or sporogenesis. Thinkers such as James Hatley, Val Plumwood and Jacques Derrida propose that edibility be factored into concepts of subjectivity, including, in Hatley's words, "the uncanny goodness of [our] being edible to bears." Emmanuel Levinas proposes the face as the basis for an ethics of self and Other, but the faces of animals (except pets) are widely believed to be the faces of species, not individuals. In summary, we will examine questions of subjectivity, the gaze and the face, constructions of the animal Other in nature photography, communication between humans and other mammals, the question of emotion as it pertains to animals other than humans, problems of anthropomorphism and anti-anthropomorphism, problems of realism in relation to representing the animal Other, captive and/or domestic vs. wild animals, ethics and etiquette in human/non-human relationships, postmodern animals, inter-species collaborations (e.g. musicians and birds), conservation rhetoric and the difficult of representing creatures who do not create documents and whose languages we do not comprehend, how theorizing the animal Other alters our sense of ourselves and our own species, and other topics.
Texts under consideration
(final text list will be available at a later date):
Nigel Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals
Matthew Calarco, Zoographies (in press)
Barney Nelson, The Wild and the Domestic: Animal Representation, Ecocriticism, and Western American Literature
Jacques Derrida, "And Say the Animal Responded?"
Cary Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal
John Berger, "Looking at Animals"
Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform
David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song
Harry Robinson, Write It on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller
Ralph Lutts, ed., The Wild Animal Story
Ernest Thompson Seton, Wild Animals I Have Known
Grey Owl, Men of the Last Frontier or other
Fred Bodsworth, Last of the Curlews
Andy Russell, Adventures with Wild Animals
Grizzly Country
Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf
Charlie Russell, Grizzly Heart
Marian Engel, Bear
Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone
Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist
Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
