Morality, Ethics, and Animal Rights in Romantic Poetry (original) (raw)
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Animal Ethics and Literary Criticism
(on Jacques Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I Am [New York: Fordham UP, 2008]; Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites: Posthumanism and the Discourse of Species [Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003]; Carrie Rohman’s, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal [New York: Columbia UP, 2009); and Philip Armstrong’s, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity [London: Routledge, 2008])
In this paper I discuss how some modern poets – such as Carlos Drummond, Jacques Roubaud and Ted Hugues – deal with this “animal subjectivity” in their poems and adopt different perspectives towards the question of animality, seeing nonhuman beings as subjects endowed with intelligence, sensitivity, and with different competencies and knowledge of the world.
2012
The histories of moral concern for animals and literary sentimentalism are intertwined, yet the reasons for this connection have been little understood. This study examines the reasons for the growth of compassion for animals in late eighteenth-century British literature and culture and the influence of sentimental poetics on the way human and animal relationships came to be understood. Additionally, I suggest that some of the questions asked about animals in the eighteenth century are now being reconsidered in the field of Animal Studies and that modern thinking about human and animal relationships bears the influence of eighteenth-century sentimentalism in both the importance placed on sympathetic imagination and, surprisingly, our disapproval of sentimentality. The Introduction considers the rise and fall of sentimental compassion for animals in eighteenth-century Britain and examines the iconic importance of the animal encounters in Laurence Sterne's novels for eighteenth-century readers and how they epitomized the notion of sensibility for admirers and detractors. I then propose an approach to understanding the role of animals in sentimentalism that draws on Derrida's work on the gift and the response of the animal and appraise current attitudes toward sentimentality in the field of Animal Studies. Chapter 1 shows how Sterne used animal encounters to explore the dynamics of sympathetic imagination and examines how the conceptual malleability of animals and their resistance to interpretation bear on the novel's analysis of personal identity and narrative authority. Chapter 2 analyzes the major tropes of sentimental animal representation in a wide array of eighteenth-century texts, with a focus on understanding how personification and apostrophe shape the dynamics of the poetic encounter with the animal. Chapter 3 considers how William Blake's writings on animals may be understood in the context of sentimentalism and the ways in which Blake addressed questions about our ethical relations with other species. Chapter 4 outlines the intellectual context of eighteenth-century concern for animals with a focus on how moral philosophy and medical discourse established models of the mind-body relationship conducive to questioning the boundary between human and animal.
When the Grass Sings: Poetic Reason and Animal Writing
Environmental Values , 2019
In this article I shall propose María Zambrano's poetic reason as a suitable method for developing a knowledge of animal being. To do so, I will follow the analyses (Derrida, Coetzee) that place animal thinking in the poetic sphere, thus showing the need for a poetic/literary knowledge to make a philosophical knowledge of the animal possible. Animal writing expresses our nature in relation to animal nature; it discloses our animal interbeingness. Finally, I will point to some of the principles of ecofeminist/animal ethics, like care and empathy, which arise both in what I propose to call animal writing and in Zambranian poetic reason.
The Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature 10.1 , 2012
CRITICAL ANIMAL STUDIES AND NON-SPECIESIST PERCEPTION OF ANIMALS IN THOMAS HARDY'S POETRY
2024
Bu çalışmanın amacı, Thomas Hardy'nin (1840-1928) şiirlerini, kritik hayvan çalışmalarını teorik bakış açısıyla inceleyerek, hayvanların süregelen sömürüsü ve istismarına karşı şairin göstermiş olduğu sosyal ve ekolojik duyarlılığı açığa çıkarmaktır. Kullanılıp atılan bir malzeme olarak görülen hayvanlara karşı haksız insan davranışlarına Hardy'nin verdiği şiirsel tepki ve onları öz-bilinçli, düşünebilen ve hissedebilen bireyler olarak tasvir etmesi takdire değer bir durumdur. Hayvanları şuursuz, pasif, acı duymayan otomat objeler olarak gören Viktorya dönemi antroposentrik düşüncenin tam karşısında duran Hardy, hayvan merkezli bir bakış açısı benimseyerek, okuyucularını insanların hayvanlara karşı vicdan yoksunu tutumlarıyla yüzleştirmiştir. İnsanların gereksiz sebepleri yüzünden işkence uygulanan havyanlara söz hakkı veren Hardy, canlı bir bireye acı ve işkence çektirmeye müsade eden, tartışılmaz derecede mükemmel görünen insanlık prensiplerinin ve ahlaki standartlarının çözülmesini sağlamıştır. İnsanın ahlaki değerler sistemini sorgularken, Hardy, hayvanları da ahlaki değerlere sahip ve çevreleriyle anlamlı ilişki kurabilecek derecede gelişmiş topluluklar olarak resmeder. Bu nedenle, Hardy'nin şiirlerinin kritik hayvan çalışmaları yönünden incelenmesi, şair tarafından benimsenen ve içinde bilinçli, sosyal ve duygusal olarak gelişmiş canlılarla dolu olan bilimsel bir evren görüşünü ortaya çıkaracaktır. This study intends to foreground Thomas Hardy's (1840-1928) social and ecological responsibility to the ongoing animal exploitation by analyzing his poems from the perspective of a recently emerging theory of critical animal studies. Hardy's poetic responsiveness to the unjust human treatment of animals as disposable materials to be used and consumed is worthy of critical attention pertaining to his depiction of animals as self-conscious, intelligent, and emotional individuals. Going against the conventional anthropocentric assumptions of the Victorian period that perceives animals as insentient, passive, and automated objects who cannot feel pain and suffering, Hardy adopts an animal-oriented viewpoint and confronts his readers with the dreadful consequences of implacable human attitude to animals. In addition to giving voice to animals who are tortured and murdered for trivial human reasons, Hardy disentangles the indubitable principles of humanity and its moral standards which give consent to the iniction of pain and anguish on another living being. While questioning the morality of human values, Hardy depicts animals as moral communities who are perfectly accomplished and sufciently advanced to initiate meaningful interaction with their environment. An elucidation of Hardy's poetry from the viewpoint of critical animal studies, hence, will provide a broad insight into Hardy's scientic understanding of the universe, replete with intelligent, socially and emotionally developed individuals who deserve the respect and approbation of humans.
2018
Please see website for details: https://www.creaturelyethicsconferencestream.com The application of a more embodied approach to ethics that also accounts for both animal and animalised humans can be found in the work of Pick (2011), she calls a creaturely ethics that takes the position that living beings, regardless of being human or not, are vulnerable beings prone to violent forces. Her work blurs the divide between the ontological status of both animals and humans, which can be the starting point of our discussions in this stream. Pick believes that individuals and societies have an obligation to try and protect vulnerable beings from violent exposure and exploitation. Drawing on the philosophical writings of Simone Weil, Pick further argues for ‘creaturely poetics’ for ‘the creature, then, is first and foremost a living – body – material, temporal, and vulnerable’ (p. 5). At the same time, vulnerability is not a mundane fact of life. Weil (1953 as cited in Pick, 2011, p. 3) believes that: “[T]he vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is the mark of existence.” At the first instance, it seems counter-intuitive to conceive of the vulnerability of living beings as beautiful, particularly when violence is inflicted upon them. But if, as Pick (2011) argues, “fragility and finitude possess a special kind of beauty, this conception of beauty is already inherently ethical. It implies a sort of sacred recognition (our emphasis) of life’s value as material and temporal” (3). In turn, this understanding of sacredness invites a reverence for the lives of others for it encourages a mode of thought that in our view, is an expansive love, to some even reflecting a form of divine suffering (Linzey, 2009). A type of love born out of the sharing of organizational space (O’Doherty, 2016), inspired by a caring ethic that heightens visibility and moral consideration (Connolly & Cullen, 2017) or ethical affordances (Warkentin, 2009) to other-than-human animals. Arising from this embodied ‘moral imagination’ (Hamington, 2008) which these relationships bring forth, empathy and care can extend beyond previously considered limitations to animals, but also certain groups of humans as well or at some intersection of the two. Afterall, a number of poststructuralist thinkers, such as Derrida (1997/2008, 2009) and Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1987), have emphasised the continuity between human and non-human animals in addition to developing critiques of anthropocentrism. The convenors of this stream welcome submissions that explore the vulnerability of diverse subjects, within multiple contexts and different disciplinary fields of study. This includes disciplines that are not traditionally associated with management and organizational studies, such as anthropology, history, film studies, art, ethnic and racial studies, ecological studies, cultural studies, queer studies, settler and colonial studies, indigenous studies, literature and health care. The overarching aim is to wrestle with the idea of the vulnerability of life and consider the possibility of sustaining ethical relations between beings that are intrinsically motivated by love, but often exists in contexts that are not always conducive to sustaining such relations. Hence, submissions to this stream could consider how an organizational, institutional or industrial context plays some role in hindering and/or facilitating ethical relationships in multiple contexts or settings.
Humanities, 2017
This article discusses how our ideas of empathy are influenced by the dichotomy of mind versus body, also known as Cartesian dualism. Within the aesthetic field, this dichotomy is seen when researchers define narrative empathy as imaginatively reconstructing the fictional character's thoughts and feelings. Conversely, the empathy aroused by a non-narrative work of art is seen as an unconscious bodily mirroring of movements, postures or moods. Thinking dualistically does not only have consequences for what we consider human nature; it also affects our view on animals. To show the untenability of dualistic thinking, this article focuses on the animal poetry genre. Using the ideas of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I analyze two animal poems: "Inventing a Horse" by Meghan O'Rourke and "Spermaceti" by Les Murray. The analysis of these two poems suggests that the presiding ideas about aesthetic empathy and empathy in general need re-evaluation.