Since at least the Renaissance, ‘the human’ has been the organising construct for the production of cultural, philosophical, scientific, political, economic, and historical knowledge. Yet, in recent years, the ontological and ethical blind spots of such anthropocentrism have been increasingly highlighted in both the sciences and the humanities. By drawing on a diverse set of related fields (including animal studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, posthumanism, cyborg theory), the so-called ‘nonhuman turn’ has compelled readers and critics to see environments, animals, and machines in literary texts not merely as backdrops to, or metaphors for, the human drama, but as vital sites of agency, experience, and meaning in their own right.
Through structured notes and in-class discussion, in this reading course we will learn how to read the anthropomorphic representation of nonhuman life and perspectives in diverse literary genres (Sci-Fi, Children’s Literature, Romanticism, Gothic, Modernism, Feminist Utopias/Dystopias) as they relate to the intersecting categories of race, gender, sexuality, and class. The syllabus will include short novels from Lewis Carroll, H.G. Wells, and Philip K. Dick, as well as short stories by Frances Power Cobbe (‘The Age of Science’), Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett (‘New Amazonia’), Franz Kafka (‘Metamorphoses’), Myles na Gopaleen (‘Two in One’); and poetry by Anna Barbauld (‘The Mouse’s Petition’), William Wordsworth (‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’), H.D. (‘Oread’), Elizabeth Bishop (‘The Fish’), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (‘Dog’), and Margaret Atwood (‘Song of the Worms’, ‘Cell’). By focusing on these representations of the nonhuman, together we will consider how the limits of the human are constantly tested, redrawn, and multiplied in the literary event in ways that can help us to think more imaginatively about the crises of our time.
- Trainer/in: Paul Fagan