Writing Nature, Representing Animals

Description

The first term will survey the development of concepts and representations of ‘nature’ by focussing on a few literary texts from four different centuries. We will begin with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, examining the ways in which recent ecocritical and animal-studies readings have revolutionised our understanding of the play. We will then consider the origins of contemporary environmental and ecological thinking in the Romantic movement: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will provide the focus for this part of the course. Next, reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea will allow us to explore the ways in which one of the great modernist writers of the twentieth century took up but also reacted against the legacy of nineteenth-century literary representations of nature. The first term will conclude with an intriguing recent novel about extinction, science and human-animal relations, Julia Leigh’s The Hunter.

The second term will concentrate on how our encounters with other species shape, and are shaped by, our cultural assumptions, practices, discourses and representations. Emphasis will be placed on analyses of social and discursive constructions of human-animal interactions across a variety of domains: zoos, animal autobiographies, animal industry advertising, digital culture, factory farming and documentaries. We will also learn about the value of critical discourse analysis when interrogating the power relations inherent in our ‘dealings’ with other animals.

(Image: "Yvette Watt, Second Sight")