Animal Presence and Human Identity in Modern Literature

Animal Presence and Human Identity in Modern Literature explores literary representations of the human-animal encounter in modernity that press human “being” to its limits. This project arises within the question, “can an animal die?,” formulated in response to Martin Heidegger’s famous assertion that, properly speaking, animals cannot “die” but can only “perish,” an assertion that sharply summarizes western “humanist” philosophical discourse – particularly as etched in the “modern turn” initiated by Descartes – in which the “human” emerges precisely as that (non)animal which enjoys a distinctive relation to both the inner essence and outer edge of existence. Alongside the philosophical continuum that stretches from the Cartesian reduction of animality to mechanistic re-action to the Heideggerian marginalization of animal life as active but unreflective materiality, literature develops a counter-examination of the human-animal nexus that variously implicates the animal in human ontology and explores that intersection as constitutive of social narratives and cultural institutions. Texts from Shakespeare to Desai have been selected for both their variety of formal and linguistic inflections of the human-animal encounter, and for their shared participation in an evolving discourse that is here termed “humanimality”: the ever-shifting interaction of human and nonhuman creatures that animates our still-evolving modernity.

Animal Presence and Human Identity in Modern Literature explores literary representations of the human-animal encounter in modernity that press human “being” to its limits. This project arises within the question, “Can an animal die?,” formulated in response to Martin Heidegger’s famous assertion that, properly speaking, animals cannot “die” but can only “perish,” an assertion that sharply summarizes western “humanist” philosophical discourse – particularly as etched in the “modern turn” initiated by Descartes – in which the “human” emerges precisely as that (non)animal which enjoys a distinctive relation to both the inner essence and outer edge of existence. Recently – most notably in the late works of Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Emmanuel Levinas – philosophers have interrogated the grounds of Heidegger’s formulation, putting into question its assumption of unnavigable distance and un-negotiable difference between humans and (other) animals, drawing partly on Darwinian conceptions of a biologistic continuum among creatures, partly on ethological revelations of animal “capacities,” and partly on ideas intrinsic to philosophy itself, such as a demystification of binarism as an instrument of philosophical structure and analysis.

The book’s overarching thesis is that, taken together, texts – including Shakespeare’s King Lear; Eliot’s Middlemarch; Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau; Atwood’s Surfacing; and Desai’s Clear Light of Day – are both distinctive in their figurations of the human-animal relation and representative of a wide spectrum of literary instantiations of the “question of the animal” for post-Enlightenment western culture.