Multispecies Fictions

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

What does it mean to be an animal? And what does it mean to be a person? Humans, after all, are one species among many—particularly in America, where a wilderness of nonhuman creatures looms on the edges of the social imaginary. American ideas about other species—how they think and feel, act and react—involve categories such as race, gender, class and ability in often-surprising ways. This course will trace the relationship between animal life and human identity in American fiction, from the advent of Darwinian thought to contemporary animal advocacy. How do discourses of race and indigeneity shape Jack London’s canine characters? How might contemporary gender politics play into stories about eating animals? How do narratives about the subjective experience of other species impact our attempts to imagine the mental lives of our fellow humans? In exploring these and other questions, students will receive an introduction to important themes of twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature, as well as to key concepts and debates in the growing field of critical animal studies and a variety of methods for approaching the study of literary narrative.