Article2009

Human, All Too Human: “Animal Studies” and the Humanities

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Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature Animal Law and Welfare Geographies of human-animal interactions

Abstract

Trying to give an overview of the burgeoning area known as animal studies is, if you'll permit me the expression, a bit like herding cats. My recourse to that analogy is meant to suggest that “the animal,” when you think about it, is everywhere (including in the metaphors, similes, proverbs, and narratives we have relied on for centuries—millennia, even). Teach a course or write an article on the subject, and well-intentioned suggestions about interesting material pour in from all quarters. In my field alone, there's not just, say, the starring role of bear, deer, and dog at the heart of William Faulkner'sGo Down, Mosesand the futility of trying to imagine Ernest Hemingway without his fraternity of bulls, lions, and fish or Marianne Moore without her menagerie of pangolins and jellyfish. There's alsoKing Kong, Babe, Charlotte's Web, Seabiscuit, The Silence of the Lambs, The Horse Whisperer, andThe Fly.There's the art of Damien Hirst, Joseph Beuys, Sue Coe, William Wegman, Bill Viola, Carolee Schneeman, Lynn Randolph, and Patricia Piccinini. And all those bird poems, from Percy Shelley's skylark and John Keats's nightingale to Edgar Allan Poe's raven and Wallace Stevens's blackbird. As any medievalist or early modern scholar will tell you, the question of the animal assumes, if anything, even more centrality in earlier periods; indeed, recent and emerging scholarship suggests a picture in which the idea of the animal that we have inherited from the Enlightenment and thinkers such as Descartes and Kant is better seen as marking a brief period (if the formative one for our prevailing intellectual, political, and juridical institutions) bookended by a pre- and posthumanism that think the human/animal distinction quite otherwise. So there's also William Hogarth and Hieronymus Bosch,The Faerie QueeneandBeowulf.And, of course, there is the central place of the animal in non-Western literature and culture, written and oral, which would require another essay altogether.

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References

1989A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1999How We Became Posthuman 2006Frontiers of justice: disability, nationality, species membership 1986Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 2010The Animal That Therefore I Am 1991Who comes after the subject?2003The Open: Man and Animal 2009Zoographies: the question of the animal from Heidegger to Derrida

Cited by

20158. Environmental Humanities 2017Biopunk Dystopias Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction 2019Posthumanism and tourism 2011Release the Moths: Critical Animal Studies and the Posthumanist Impulse 2015Does meat come from animals? A multispecies approach to classification and belonging in highland Guatemala 2012Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies 2019The Political Lives of Victorian Animals

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