Morality, Ethics, and Animal Rights in Romantic Poetry (original) (raw)
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.
Visva Bharati Quarterly, 2017
This essay is an extract from my Master's dissertation; a comparative analysis of the poetical works of Ted Hughes and Jibanananda Das, in terms of theme imagery and diction. The representation of animals in the poems of Hughes and Das is the chief focus of the essay. The theoretical framework for this analysis is the concept of totemic animals, and their relationship with humans in existing indigenous cultures. The theories on Carl Gustav Jung, Mircea Eliade and Alan Bleakley are taken into account in this context. The essay establishes that the works of both Das and Hughes express anti-anthropocentric sentiments in their poems through the representation of animals. In doing so, they show some striking similarities in terms of imagery and diction. Both their poems display a clear Jungian influence and Shamanistic elements, although Hughes's works show the latter traits more visibly.
The Ethical Animal: From Peter Singer to Patricia Highsmith
2012
Recognizing Animal Studies his essay places in dialogue the work of Peter Singer, the utilitarian philosopher of animal liberation, and Patricia Highsmith, whose fiction of the early 1970s takes a curious interest in the topic of animal welfare. My argument will partly be that animals enter the ethical stage for Singer at a moment when utilitarianism comes under fire from a contract ethics that Singer rejects on the assumption that such ethics cannot be reconciled with our obligations to non-contractual creatures to whom we nonetheless owe consideration. For this reason, I argue, Singer has proved especially unwelcome among scholars of contemporary animal studies who insist that what matters in animal-human relations is an ethics of reciprocity. Highsmith's A Dog's Ransom (1972) and The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder (1975) set in play a contest between utility and contract in regard to human-animal relations, and arrive at conclusions that look awfully close to Singer's. By way of her interest in animals as the subjects and objects of brute violence, Highsmith also allows us a novel vantage on the fascination among contemporary ethicists with fictive scenarios, not unlike the novelist's own, in which the crucial issue is whether the killing of other people is permissible or blameworthy. In this section, I consider the vexing role Singer occupies among contemporary theorists of what Kari Weil calls "the animal turn." 1 In the next section, I situate Highsmith's animal fiction in the context of the debate between utilitarian and contract ethics. In the essay's final section, I connect the murder weapon in Highsmith's most politicized animal story-a pulled lever in "The Day of Reckoning," which focuses on battery-farmed chickens-to the pervasive interest among many philosophers in the seeming non-agency, and dramatic outcomes, of actions like button-pushing. It may seem perverse to couple Singer (whose whole career might be said to comprise a reply to the question "Why be moral?") with Highsmith (whose whole career might be said to comprise a steadfast indifference to that question). Yet Singer is somewhat notorious for what many observers (and more than a few philosophers) take to be a calculating heartlessness reminiscent of Highsmith's vintage sociopaths. "We can't take our feelings as moral data, immune from rational criticism," he writes in his response to J.M. Coetzee's 1999 Tanner Lectures, The Lives of Animals. 2 This typically hardboiled comment is occasioned by Singer's encounter with the fictional Elizabeth Costello, who maintains that more recognition of our feelings toward animals affords a more nuanced sense of our duties to them. Thus "when we divert the current of feeling that flows between ourself [sic] and the animal into words," Costello asserts, "we abstract it forever from the animal." 3 For Singer by contrast, the proper tendency of ethics is away from feeling toward abstraction. All that matters in our moral obligations toward animals is that they feel-or, more exactly, that they are capable of feeling pleasure and pain. Singer's strictly utilitarian notion of "feeling" is something of an outlier within the emerging field of animal studies. For many scholars involved in that field, the crucial issue regarding our ethical relation to animals is not the simple or uncontroversial fact that animals feel, or even Coetzee's (or Costello's) less simple or more controversial point that we should take our feelings about animals into account, but rather how animals feel about us. This is perhaps too glib a way of putting the matter. What I mean to highlight is the large number of scholars in animal studies who, taking their lead for the study of ethics from Emmanuel Levinas, seek to assert the primacy of reciprocity in relations between humans and nonhumans. In "The Name of a Dog" (1975), Levinas records a wartime memory of his internment in a German P.O.W. camp, where "halfway through our long captivity," a "cherished dog" named Bobby "would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men." On account of his powers of recognition, Levinas dubs Bobby "the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims." 4 And on account of his relegating Bobby's generosity to no more than instinct, it would be more accurate to say that for scholars of animal studies, Levinas is less the sponsor of their project than its point of departure, insofar as these thinkers infer from his story a more radical conclusion than Levinas himself was willing to reach. For Matthew Calarco, Levinas's story is "proto-ethical" but realizes "no politics or ethics proper"
From Phoenix to Chauntecleer: Medieval English Animal Poetry (1996)
This 240-page study on the use and function of animals in medieval English vernacular literature covers a period of roughly 700 years (A.D. 700 – c. A.D. 1400). Although a wealth of critical literature exists on most of the poems treated, no comprehensive comparative study which discusses the function of the animal-protagonists has been available so far. It is thus the intention of the present study to fill this gap and to provide an in-depth analysis of the major ‘animal poems’. The introductory part provides a general historical survey of medieval animal literature, its roots, its various genres, and its relation to the history of ideas. Yet, of this plethora of genres which use animals as their main protagonists, or at least objects, only three traditions are of importance for vernacular English literature. These are the Physiologus-tradition, the typically English genre of ‘bird debates’, and the ‘beast epic and beast fable’ traditions. In the ensuing chapters, the study follows a rough chronology, starting with the earliest tradition (i.e. the Physiologus-tradition) and closing with the ‘beast epic and beast fable’ traditions (of which Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is the last and most accomplished representative analysed). Thus, after the introduction, the second chapter deals with the Physiologus-tradition, which comprises The Old English Phoenix, The Old English Physiologus, and The Middle English Physiologus. The third chapter analyses the ‘bird debate’ poems (The Owl and the Nightingale, The Thrush and the Nightingale, The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, and The Parlement of Foulys), and the fourth chapter is devoted to the English offshoots of the continental ‘beast fable’ and ‘beast epic’ traditions (The Vox and the Wolf and Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale). A brief survey of the subsequent development of these three main traditions and a final evaluation of the different genres treated in the preceding chapters provide the conclusion to the study. As a rule, each new chapter begins with an introduction to the relevant literary, historical, cultural, philosophical, and religious backgrounds necessary for a full understanding of the function of the animal-protagonists in the poems dealt with. A ‘close reading’ of the poems and a detailed discussion of the function of the animal-protagonists follows. Even though most chapters could be read on their own, the roughly chronological presentation of the four traditions contributes to a step-by-step initiation into the increasingly complex interpretation of the animal-protagonists of the later poems. Thus, to give just one example, the hen, the cock and the fox in Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale are no longer merely the anthropomorphised animals known from the beast epic; they also contribute to the allegorical potential that is the heritage of the Physiologus-tradition, and which leads to a complex and multi-layered reading not only of the protagonists, but also of the narrative itself. Thus, each succeeding chapter takes into account the results of the previous ones, widens the reader’s horizon and enables him or her to achieve a fuller appreciation of the qualities and peculiarities of the individual poem. Thus, the study highlights the gradual development which took place in the use of animals as main protagonists. As a result, it can be said that the often rather simplistic and one-dimensional allegorical interpretations of the Physiologus-tradition gradually gave way to a more complex and increasingly secular outlook (see, for example, The Owl and the Nightingale). In the end, this new way of looking at things not only superseded the moralistic-religious bias, but was at the same time able to incorporate the symbolic potential of the older tradition, and thus to level the way for the creation of works of great sophistication, such as The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.
Rescuing the other. Literary approaches towards animal’s studies
Anthropological Researches and Studies, 2017
Objectives. This paper explores the anthropological difference through the analysis of bringing rescue. To bring rescue to the other should be founded on the recognition of his suffering. But in many cases, this recognition is faulty and is based on a misunderstanding of animal/insect world. Material and methods. Through a case study of two famous literary texts in which a human-beetle relationship appears (authored by F. Kafka and W. Gombrowicz), at the crossing of philosophy and poetry, the author of the article tries to approach as close as possible the experience of a transhumanist rescue attempt. Results and Conclusions. The metamorphosis effectuates a true displacement in the relationship between man and animal but what Kafka describes is not the transfiguration of man into a beetle but rather the metamorphosis that affects the family.
Animal sanctity and animal sacrifice : how post-Darwinian fiction treats animal victims
1989
This dissertation analyses animal victims appearing in fiction written since 1859, the year Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. It assumes as a premise that the Darwinian idea of continuity between human and nonhuman animals has altered the fundamental character of cultural conceptions of animals. It assumes, further, that post-Darwinian culture recognizes the need to acknowledge the experiences of animals independent of the usefulness or significance animals have for humankind. Modern culture strives to understand the value life has for the animal itself. That effort is crucial to approaches to animal victims, because culture, which knows animals best in their role as victims, is itself founded upon human domination of nonhuman animals. Social, scientific and technological progress has steadily increased human authority over the natural world; psychically and morally, the civilized person is presumed to have suppressed the beast in himself or herself. Darwinism, however, has upset the anthropocentric bias, and, a s a consequence, the animal victim has now become a source of conflict for modern culture. The dissertation explores the ways in which particular stories try to address the reality of the autonomous animal, and notes the kinds of resistance evident in the stories' attempts to derive meaning from the animal victim. It examines the specific challenges the animal victim brings to bear against the conventions of indifference or compassion that reinforce anthropocentrism. The modern treatment of animal victims pushes fiction into boundary situations where conventions collapse and ways of knowing the world are shaken. At the same time the animal victim shapes the narrative world and addresses significant conflicts in modern life. Fiction manifests contemporary discomfort with the animal victim. In this investigation, analysis proceeds primarily upon close reading of the conflicts surrounding animal victims in individual works of fiction. In terms of overall structure, stories are classified according to specific kinds of conflicts embodied in the animal victim. The opening chapter provides an historical background and notes several theoretical complications involved in aggression against animals. The next five chapters deal one-byone with categories of fiction in which the victimized animal is more and more deeply implicated in diverse cultural dilemmas. The categories are these: animal victims in the wild, animal victims in urban settings, sexual conflict and the animal victim, myth and the animal victim, and animal victims doubly abused by narrative strategies. This study speculates that, with respect to art and its faithfulness to life, modern fiction has realized that animals are not passive recipients of human projection, and that violence against animals is perpetrated upon beings whose reality places a legitimate claim upon cultural attention. The aim of the discussion is to establish that modern fiction is exploring ways in which ethics and art can truly acknowledge animal identity. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Researching, planning and writing this dissertation has been a fulfilling experience. Many people have contributed both to the pleasures of the initial explorations and to the merits of the finished work. I owe much to the friendly interest of individuals. First, however, I must thank several administrative associations a t Simon Fraser University. I am grateful to the Dean of Graduate Studies and the Faculty of Arts for providing financial support, and hence some free time, for this study. I have appreciated, also, the liberal climate of critical inquiry established a t the English Department. Were it not for the English Department's willingness to foster independent literary research, the idea for this project might have faded away unexamined. Through every phase of this endeavour, people have been more than generous with suggestions and insights. I am indebted to the following people for spotting items in journals and the media, for bringing particular works of fiction to my attention, and for engaging in lively discussions of the cultural issues involved in this research: Vincent
Unlocking the Voices of the Nonhuman: A Hermeneutic Analysis of Eighteenth-Century Animalographies
Transylvanian Review, 2023
Voicing the literary animal is a task of immense responsibility. Exploring two eighteenth-century novels, namely The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1784) and Biography of a Spaniel (1797), this essay aims to analyze the use of nonhuman narrators and their surfacing insights into humananimal relationality. By employing Hanna Meretoja’s concept of “narrative hermeneutics” and Anat Pick’s “creaturely poetics,” the analysis questions the ways in which animalographies empower the voices and agency of nonhuman entities in literature and shift the narrative away from a human-centric one to a more inclusive, multispecies one. To this end, the literary animal’s employment and portrayal delimitates ethical spheres of interaction within the narrative, reassessing the hierarchical model constructed by anthropocentrism and challenging the traditional, dominant narrative that prioritizes human experience and perception.