“Are we not Men?”: Reading the Human-Animal Interface in Science Fiction through John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?” (original) (raw)
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What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity
What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity argues that nonhuman animals, and stories about them, have always been closely bound up with the conceptual and material work of modernity. In the first half of the book, Philip Armstrong examines the function of animals and animal representations in four classic narratives: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Frankenstein and Moby-Dick. He then goes on to explore how these stories have been re-worked, in ways that reflect shifting social and environmental forces, by later novelists, including H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Brigid Brophy, Bernard Malamud, Timothy Findley, Will Self, Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel and J.M. Coetzee. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity also introduces readers to new developments in the study of human-animal relations. It does so by attending both to the significance of animals to humans, and to animals’ own purposes or designs; to what animals mean to us, and to what they mean to do, and how they mean to live.
Océanide. Journal of the Spanish Society for the Study of Popular Culture SELICUP, 2020
Science fiction in the last decades has often empowered machines and provided humans with enhanced characteristics through the use of technology (the limits of artificial intelligence and transhumanism are frequent themes in recent narratives), but animal empowerment has also been present through the concept of uplifting, understood as the augmentation of animal intelligence through technology. Uplifting implies providing animals with the capacity to speak and reason like humans. However, it could be argued that such implementation fails to acknowledge animal cognition in favour of anthropomorphized schemes of thought. Humankind's lack of recognition of different animal types of communication has been portrayed in fiction and often implies the adaptation of the animal Other to human needs and expectations, creating a post-animal that communicates its needs to the reader through borrowed words. The main objective of this article is to analyze the use of uplifting as a strategy to give voice to animals in two science fiction novels written in English, both published in the twenty-first century: Lagoon (Abstract Rosa María Moreno Redondo Universitat de les Illes Balears https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0087-4034 ORCID: La ciencia ficción de las últimas décadas a menudo ha empoderado a las máquinas y ha dotado de características superiores a los humanos a través de la tecnología (los límites de la inteligencia artificial y el transhumanismo son temas frecuentes en narrativas recientes), pero el empoderamiento animal también ha estado presente a través del concepto de uplifting, entendido como el aumento de la inteligencia animal a través de la tecnología. El uplifting implica proporcionar a los animales la capacidad de hablar y razonar como los humanos. Sin embargo, podría decirse que esta puesta en práctica no tiene en consideración la cognición animal, favoreciendo los esquemas del pensamiento humano. La falta de reconocimiento de los diferentes tipos de comunicación por parte del ser humano se ha representado en la ficción y a menudo implica la adaptación del Otro animal a las necesidades y expectativas humanas, creando un post-animal que comunica sus necesidades con palabras prestadas. El principal objetivo de esta comunicación es analizar el uso del uplifting como estrategia para dar voz a los animales en dos textos narrativos de ciencia ficción en lengua inglesa, ambos publicados en el siglo XXI: las novelas Lagoon (2014) de la autora nigeriano-americana Nnedi Okorafor y Bête (2014) del escritor británico Adam Roberts. Este artículo examina desde una perspectiva ecocrítica y de estudios sobre la relación entre humano-animal (ERHA) las diferencias así como los puntos en común en la exploración del tema en ambas novelas, las cuales se relacionan a menudo con la predisposición o el rechazo del humano a ver al Otro como un igual. Uplifting, alteridad, antropomorfismo, ERHA, inteligencia artificial Palabras clave: Resumen
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Fictional Menageries: Writing Animals in the Early Twenty-First Century
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In 'On the Animal Turn', Harriet Ritvo notes that though 'learned attention to animals is far from new', stretching indeed as far back as Aristotle's Historia Animalium, 'nevertheless, during the last several decades, animals have emerged as a more frequent focus on scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, as quantified in published books and articles, conference presentations, new societies, and new journals.' 1 Before delving into Timothy C. Baker's Writing Animals, itself part of one of a scholarly series to have emerged in this budding field (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature), it is useful to note a few things about the circumstances attending the field's rise. As its name clearly suggests, literary animal studies is a subset within the array of subfields within so-called 'critical animal studies', which also include ecology, philosophy, ethics, history, cognition and language studies, but also, and equally importantly, social justice and activist movements, from ones focused on preservation of habitats, the humane treatment of animals and the ban on industrial and medical exploitation and cruelty to positive animal rights in freedom and dignity, to vegetarianism and veganism. Institutionally, as we learn from the accounts of Nik Taylor and Richard Twine, as well as Anthony J. Nocella II et al., critical animal studies grew out of nineteenth-century interventions like Henry Salt's Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Moral Progress of 1894 and the post WW2 confluence between animal rights and other social justice movements as reflected in Peter Singer's foundational Animal Liberation of 1975, until they led to the foundation of the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs in 2001 and the Institute for Critical Animal Studies in 2007. The affiliated Journal for Critical Animal Studies was re-launched in the same year as a follow-up to its previous incarnation, the Animal Liberation Philosophy and
UNDER THE SKIN: THE INFLUENCE OF (SCIENCE) FICTION AND ITS MEDIUMS IN CREATURE INTERRELATION
2019
If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with 1 Science fiction is a genre that constantly brings humanity into question, and this has grown with the fast development of technology and Artificial Intelligence, as we can see in Delacruz's study on the subject, which proves that AI's 2 growth has affected the fiction genre in seeking a more animal 3 approach, one that investigates our natural self: what we conceive as our animality. Indeed, this development of the technological society and AI not only rises questions of humanity in relation to technology, but also to animality. The fast pace in which technology evolves creates a space where animals disappear and our animality arises. What we understand as human gets blurred and fiction becomes a crucial space for human exploration in relation to nature and hence, creatures. Our concept and understanding of 1 J. M Coetzee and Amy Gutmann, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 2 Artificial Intelligence. 3 Even though in the novel aliens are called 'humans' and humans are called 'animals,' I will be referring to the aliens as animals, and vodsels/animals as humans, in order to make a clearer statement in understanding how human and animals' relations are depicted in the studied works and to make it easier for the reader to understand the point of the essay. However, when alluding to both, I will refer to them as 'creatures,' taking Pick's concept into question, being a term that does not attempt to differentiate between animals, which would be a suitable term, but which has largely been misunderstood and misplaced.
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])