Undergraduate Course: Beastly Writing: Animals, Literature, Modernity (ENLI10412)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course will introduce students to the rich and diverse body of modern literature that has looked to reimagine the relationship between animals and humans. It will focus on the textual innovations, or instances of 'beastly writing', in which writers attempted to find new ways of expressing ideas about animal life, species difference, human animality and the animalisation of certain humans, animal rights, ethology and ecology, and, vegetarianism/veganism (among other topics). In so doing, it will show how the 'question of the animal' was, and continues to be, central to the development of modern literature that looked to revise how we understand ourselves and our animal others. The course will also introduce students to the growing interdisciplinary field of animal studies, presenting them with theoretical and critical touchstones and demonstrating the ways in which both literature and theory is at the forefront of many of the debates around animal issues, from veganism to the future of zoos to pet ownership. |
| Course description |
Is it possible to imagine what it is like to be a different species? How does literature influence our sense of kinship towards other animals and how we should behave towards them? What does it mean to think of the human as a writing animal? And what are the implications of these questions for humans who have been historically animalised on the basis of race or ethnicity? These questions, and others, have spurred a range of innovative literary responses throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with writers finding new ways to explore the aesthetic, ontological and ethical implications of living with, and as, animals.
This course will introduce you to some of the most significant examples of modern and contemporary literature about animals. Focusing each week on different thematic and theoretical topics, you'll encounter writers from very different backgrounds, ranging across different literary periods and taking in a variety of literary genres including prose fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. You'll also be introduced to ideas and insights from animal studies, each week being introduced to key theorists and figures from within this interdisciplinary field. By the course end, you'll come to see how writers develop new forms of writing to respond to ideas about animal life and actively shape society, politics and law, sometimes in very direct ways.
Topics covered in seminars may include: anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism; posthumanism; animal otherness; the cultural implications of Darwinism; companion species; ecology and ethology; zoos, livestock farming and factory farming; animal ethics and animal rights; and vegetarianism and veganism.
Each year the selection of text varies, but in recent years writers on the course have included Charles Darwin, Anna Sewell, D. H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Jesmyn Ward and J. M. Coetzee. Animal studies theorists typically on the reading list include Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, Carol J. Adams, John Berger and Thomas Nagel (among others).
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Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Produce work that demonstrates an extensive, critical and detailed understanding of literature about animals written.
- Confidently draw on established modes of literary criticism to discuss and analyse how literature shapes human understanding of animal life.
- Engage with theoretical and critical frameworks that enable a sophisticated, historically alert approach to the question of how and why writers use different literary innovations in their texts.
- Have an advanced and nuanced understanding of the social and ethical debates that currently frame human and animal relations.
- Reflect on the benefits of taking an interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature and animals.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Knowledge and Understanding: Students will have the opportunity to demonstrate their detailed knowledge of modern and contemporary literary responses to questions around animals. Students will also have the opportunity to develop a confident and critical grasp of the key theories, discussions and debates within the interdisciplinary field of animal studies, and will be able to see where such theories might be brought into dialogue with literature.
Applied Knowledge, Skills and Understanding: Through preparatory work for seminar discussions and during the research and writing of formal assessment tasks, students will have been able to practice the application of these concepts in their construction of arguments about the course material.
Communication: through participating in these tasks students will also have demonstrated the ability to communicate ideas and information about specialised topics in the discipline to an informed audience of their peers and subject specialists.
Autonomy and Working with Others: students will also have shown the capacity to work autonomously and in small groups on designated tasks, develop new thinking with their peers, and take responsibility for the reporting, analysis and defence of these ideas to a larger group. |
| Additional Class Delivery Information |
one 2-hour Seminar per week;
one 1-hour Autonomous Learning Group per week (at time to be arranged) |
| Keywords | Animals; species; animal rights; environmental humanities; veganism; Victorian; modernism; |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Peter Adkins
Tel: (0131 6)51 7112
Email: Peter.Adkins@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Hope Hamilton
Tel: (0131 6)50 4167
Email: hope.hamilton@ed.ac.uk |
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