Poster 12

My research considers the role literature plays in helping us understand the human-animal bond. I use examples drawn from science fiction texts, which enable a greater breadth in animal characterisation (e.g. animals that have evolved speech, telepathic communication between human and animals, animals that have been genetically engineered in various ways). The purpose of this study is to consider to what degree and how such fictional characterisations of animals can further our understanding of the human-animal bond.

Literature has played a larger role in shaping the human-animal bond than has often been acknowledged. My methodology of literary analysis takes up the question of the relative merits of rational versus empathetic engagement with animals. In his 1997 Tanner Lecture of Human Values, J.M. Coetzee used the literary notion of the 'sympathetic imagination' -- an identification with the object of contemplation that gives insight into its nature, identity and truth through a kind of direct experience -- to consider the relation between humans and animals. Instead of delivering a lecture on human-animal relations, Coetzee tells a story of Elizabeth Costello, a novelist invited to give a lecture on a topic of her choosing; she chooses animals and our moral relations to them, arguing that this cannot be a topic for mere theorising but must be something that is felt. By choosing himself to tell the story of Costello instead of deliver his own lecture on animal rights, Coetzee demonstrates the importance of those human qualities to which literature speaks in thinking through our relation to animals.

The main conclusion I draw is that although literature to a large degree represents our projections in its depictions of animals and thus speaks more to human values than animal realities, such projections are nonetheless an important force shaping our material interactions with animals and thus merit analysis.