LLC Work in Progress Seminar
Wednesday 16 March 2016
17:30-18:30
Room 3.39, 50 George Square
We are pleased to announce that the next LLC WIP Seminar will feature three speakers in a panel entitled: Toward and Beyond Non-Human Subjectivities
How do humans know and relate to the nonhuman? What ethical relationships do we have with animals and landscapes? Is it even possible for us to go beyond the anthropocentrism at the heart of the way in which we interact with and understand the world around us through language? This panel will consider these questions about the relations between the human and non-human in ways which, although strikingly different, nevertheless still share common ethical and ontological questions about the relationship between the human and non-human. (Download full abstracts: http://cl.ly/3K1T1D0R263p/)
This panel presentation will feature:
Kenneth Chan: Inescapable Anthropocentricity of Human-Nonhuman Communication in Dog Narratives: Paul Auster's Timbuktu and J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip
Kenneth Chan's reading of Paul Auster’s Timbuktu and J.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip considers the ways in which human-nonhuman communication (especially through the mode of the ‘animalography’) remains inescapably anthropocentric: because the nonhuman other cannot speak for itself, the contact between humans and nonhumans does not allow for the decentring of anthropocentric perspectives or the re-assertion of the continuities between the human and non-human.
Kirsten Lopez: « Ele a sen d’ume » : defining and navigating human-animal boundaries in the Lais of Marie de France
Kirsten Lopez's paper considers the representation of animal-human metamorphosis and anthropomorphism in the twelfth-century Lais of Anglo-Norman writer Marie de France, focusing on the animal as representation of man’s inner self. She examines the ways in which the boundary between the human and the animal were fluid and that ‘human nature’, however defined, remained continuous with ‘animal instincts’ that were still inherent in people’s behaviour.
Vivek Santayana: Nature and the Other: the Ecological Critique of Imperialism in Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist and J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K
Vivek Santayana engages with what the ecofeminist critic Val Plumwood describes as the discourse of human mastery over non-human nature, a discourse which has deep ideological continuities with structures of imperialism and colonial dominance. He examines the ways in which J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K and Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist critique this discourse of mastery by showing nature to resist human control, and instead reimagining the relationship between the human and non-human as an intersubjective relationship of ethical interdependence.