Animal Tales

"We polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves."

 -Donna Haraway

In the last several decades, Animal Studies has emerged as a robust interdisciplinary field that once again seeks to engage with “the question of the animal,” as Derrida puts it. In this course, we will look at works of cultural production that explore the myriad relationships between human and nonhuman animals. We will read stories that dissolve the barrier between the domestic and the wild. We will read stories about human-animal hybrids. We will read stories from an animal’s-eye-view, imagining the world as an animal might: as a worm digging through the dirt toward an imagined utopia, as an elephant seeking vengeance against poachers, as a cultivated monkey exhausted by the cruelty of human society.

As the popular post-humanist scholar Donna Haraway puts it: We polish an animal mirror to look at ourselves. What can animals teach us about ourselves, and more importantly, what can animals teach us about how to survive our own nature? In the midst of this sixth extinction, animals are disappearing at a rapid rate due to human activity. Will it still be possible to cohabit peacefully, ecologically, with one another? By imagining the private lives of animals and writing stories from their perspective, can we still intervene and cultivate the necessary cross-species connections that will carry us into a more just and entwined future?