Professor: Casey Shoop
4 credits
We have all stood before the eyes of a non-human animal and wondered around the intimate meaning of that look, the only partially accessible worlds in those eyes as well as what they see in us. In recent years many different academic disciplines have begun to interrogate “the animal” with renewed interest, questioning not only the divide between humans and animals, but also the nature of animal consciousness and subjectivity, and the ethics and politics of animal life in relation to our own. But literature and philosophy have long sought access to the lives of animals through the imagination.
This course will explore the capacities and limits of the human imagination to access the lives of our non-human animal others. Conversely, we will also examine what these cultural and historical representations tell us about ourselves in our very desire to project upon (or anthropomorphize) non-human animal others. What does it mean to inhabit the mind of a non-human animal in aesthetic media? Is this pure speculative fancy or can we actually experience something of what it is like to be embodied in a completely different kind of species-being? Along the way, we’ll also take up contemporary debates about animal rights, eating meat, and industrialized factory farming.