HAS Courses in English & Literature
Broward College, South Campus
Vicki Hendricks
Animal-Human Interaction in Literature - Fully Online Course
Animals in literature have always captivated readers. The evolution of animal-human relationships from the 19th century to the present offers an interesting field of study, including animals as symbols, concepts of ownership versus companionship, cooperation and conflict in nature, suffering and morality, and literalist anthropomorphism as opposed to otherness-in-connection. Poe's "The Black Cat," Tolstoy's Strider: The Story of a Horse, London's The Call of the Wild, Woolf's Flush: A Biography and contemporary works Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, and The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst are the selected texts for discussion and written analysis.
Carroll University
Susan Nusser
Writing
Seminar: Animal Themes
This seminar
uses a theme-based approach in which we will focus on a body of readings on the
same theme--animals and society. By reading multiple texts about animals and our
relationship to them, we can examine the many roles that animals play in human
societies. The common theme will help you develop your reading skills as we
analyze subtle differences between our authors' arguments.
City University of New York, Brooklyn
Karl Steel
Saints, Monsters, and Animals in the Middle Ages
Despite the insights of evolutionary biology, and critiques of the autonomy of the soul, self, and language based in psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and various historical methodologies, literary criticism and philosophy have persisted in considering humans as fundamentally distinct from all other worldly life. The Christian Middle Ages, with its insistence on the linguistic, rational, and ethical particularity of human life, is a key source of such dominant conceptions of the human, but its literary works may also model ways to reconceive our humanity more generously. By reading medieval works from a variety of genres, we will track the the multiple and shifting edges of humanity as it abuts on, and mixes with, the super-, sub-, and extrahuman, to seek to describe a posthumanism worthy of the name.
Colorado State University
Michael Lundblad
American Literature in Cultural Contexts: Contemporary American Animality
Animals are everywhere in American cultural texts: from children's movies to critically acclaimed postmodern writing; from Animal Planet to King Kong; from bestsellers on the inner lives of animals to blockbuster documentaries on people living-and dying-with wild animals. Why are we so fascinated with these various animals and the people who know them? This course will explore representations of animals-and humans as animals-in the work of contemporary writers, such as Linda Hogan, Mark Doty, Philip K. Dick, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as films, such as Gorillas in the Mist, Grizzly Man, and the 2005 remake of King Kong. Our interdisciplinary approach will draw upon debates from the academic fields of animality studies, American studies, and critical theory, in order to focus on several key issues: animal rights; arguments for the humane treatment of various human and animal populations; evolutionary theories used to explain human and nonhuman behavior; and narrative attempts to redeem "the human" in relation to how we interact with "the animal." We will also pay close attention to the historical relationship between discourses of animality and the construction of human categories of sexuality, gender, and race. With these issues and questions in mind, we will dive deeply into course texts and films and hope to develop frameworks for thinking about other representations of animality in America today.
Drury
University
Animals in Literature
Students explore the relationships between humans and animals
through the lens of American, English, French and Latin American literature.
These enjoyable and thought-provoking literary selections offer a unique entrée
into the animal rights debate, which is unquestionably one of the most important
ethical issues of our day. At the same time, the course is structured to pay
particular attention to close-reading, develop an appreciation of canonical
literature and improve writing skills.
Georgia State University
Randy Malamud
Representations of Animals
In this course we will engage with newly-emerging academic work in the field of anthrozoology (human-animal studies). I am interested (and I hope you will be, too!) in what happens when human and nonhuman animals collide in the realm of culture. I strongly encourage you to make connections between anthrozoology and whatever existing interests and expertise you're developing in your graduate program; this shouldn't be too difficult, as animals are everywhere. Anthrozoology as a literary methodology reiterates the template of Marxist and feminist theory: as feminist critics, for example, look at a text and find the sublimated or oppressed presence and importance of women, or Marxists look at culture through the lens of class, anthrozoologists look at our cultural practices and texts informed by the workings of ecology, and . . . . all sorts of importnat things start to happen when we focus in on the decentered other (i.e., the animal).
Georgia State University
Randy Malamud
Senior Seminar in Ecocriticism
The topic/methodology that we'll be studying is ecocriticism. Short definition: ecologically-inspired analysis of culture; longer definitions to be developed as we read and write. I will talk about my work in ecocriticism, and my sense of how it functions as a discipline and what it can and should do within and beyond the academy.
Hamilton College
Onno Oerlemans
The Literary Animal
Human culture has always been deeply interested in, and closely connected to, animals. Not surprisingly, literature reflects this interest in a variety of ways. In this course, we'll examine the complexity of representing animals in literature by reading poetry, novels, and plays that reflect the human/animal divide, imagine being animal, or use animals as symbols for other purposes. We'll also discuss how these texts reveal philosophical and moral issues that arise from our relationships with animals. Texts include those such as Swift's Gulliver's Travels, London's Call of the Wild, Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone. We'll also read a broad range of poetry.
Humane Society University
Marion Copeland
Animals in Literature: Animal Voices, Human Visions
Literature provides insight into human attitudes
toward nonhuman animals; it also uses nonhumans as a means of examining and
understanding what it means to be human.
More significantly for Animal Studies, literature can provide a lens
through which human animals may learn more about their nonhuman neighbors,
offering insights into their biology, behavior, and culture, as well as into
the difficulties they encounter while surviving in the evolving habitats all
living beings contribute to and share.
Works of animal literature have been shown to raise consciousness about
animals as well as to encourage both empathy with nonhumans and active
participation in animal welfare and animal rights movements. The four thematic
areas into which the course is divided reflect these concerns. When literary portraits of the lives of
nonhumans are accurate and empathetic, they allow humans to use the powers of
their metamorphic imaginations, the basis of our ability to �pretend,� to inhabit
nonhuman worlds (The title of the course has recently been revised to reflect
this and will soon be in the catalog as �The Literary Animal: Raising
Consciousness Through Fiction�). Such
narrative imaginings should provide, according to legal scholar Martha
Nussbaum, the basis of human behavior toward others, human and nonhuman.
Iowa State UniversityTeresa Mangum
Literature and Society: Capturing Animals
In this course, our overarching goal will be to develop an understanding of what animals "mean" in our culture and of the many ways we use animals-as companions, as metaphors and images to represent fears, pleasures, and assumptions, as food, as objects for pleasure and sadly for abuse, as commodities, as projections of qualities we wish to possess. We will also be participating in a new educational approach called Service-Learning so that in addition to using literary and theoretical printed and visual work as our course texts, we will also be using your own experiences and reflections. During your service at the Iowa City/Coralville Animal Center, the stories and insights that you collect there will essentially form an additional course text. In effect, we'll be "capturing animals" throughout the semester: in fiction, in the Animal Center, in advertisements, in theoretical accounts of human-animal relations, in community policies governing animals, in university policies on animal research, in popular culture, and in politics. Throughout the semester, we'll return to a number of research questions which will knit together class readings, your service at the Animal Center, and, I hope, ultimately the reflections, discussions, written work, and research that will bind us together as a class.
Keene State College
Literature and the Environment
This interdisciplinary course introduces students to the traditions of environmental literature. Students will learn to think across the humanities, arts, and sciences. May explore a particular group of writers, genre, historical period, or bioregion. May be repeated once as topics change.
Lafayette College
Carrie Rohman
Humans and Other Animals in Twentieth Century Literature and Culture
This course investigates the ways in which non-human animals are situated within literary and cultural discourse and examines the more specific issue of "rights" for those animals. We will seek to understand how various animals are valued and used in our culture, what ideas underlie such distinctions, and how these ideas have been challenged by recent work in animal rights philosophy. The course begins with a broad introduction to the ways animals have been theorized within our own (Western) intellectual tradition and then engages the primary critical positions within animal rights debates. These readings prepare us for the final segment of the course which examines representations of the human/animal boundary in (mostly) twentieth-century literature.
In our early discussions, we will look at questions of empathy and anthropocentrism (Walker, "Am I Blue?") alongside philosophical and theoretical elaborations of the human/animal relationship (Freud and Bataille). Our second unit examines classic philosophical work by Singer and Regan, and also looks at more contemporary critiques of that work (Slicer). Among our literary considerations will be the role of Enlightenment rationality in relation to science and humanism at the turn of the twentieth century (Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau), the reversal of traditional humanist hierarchies in science fiction texts (Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), and questions of human and animal agency, suffering, and mourning (Coetzee, Disgrace). As part of the course you will participate in animal-related service work in the Easton area and will use our readings and discussions to contextualize that experience. Service-learning courses aim to give you hands-on experiences, outside the classroom, that enrich and complicate your in-class studies. Service courses also involve you in the community and allow you to examine questions and problems from a new perspective, developing your own experiential "text" that you can analyze and critique.
New York University
Una Chaudhuri
Animal Rites
This course will explore the relationship between performance and the fast-growing new field of Animal Studies, which examines the cultural meaning of human animal practices. These include not only literary representations of animals (from Aesop's Fables to Will Self's Great Apes), not only dramatic representations of animals (from Aristophanes' The Frogs to Shaeffer's Equus to Albee's The Goat), not only animal performances in circuses and on stage, but also such ubiquitous or isolated social practices as pet-keeping, cock-fighting, dog shows, equestrian displays, rodeos, bull-fighting, animal sacrifice, hunting, animal slaughter, and meat-eating. We will study plays and films that explore the ways our interaction with animals shapes our accounts of the human, the "other" (including the racial and ethnic other), and the world. Plays: Rhinoceros (Ionesco), Equus (Shaeffer), The Goat, The Zoo Story(Albee), The Swan (Egloff), The Hairy Ape (O'Neill), Sylvia (Gurney) Far Away(Churchill), Cries from the Mammal House (Johnson) The Gnadiges Fraulien (Tennessee Williams). Films: The Silence of the Lambs, Amores Perroes, Carnage, Twelve Monkeys, Planet of t
Notre Dame de Namur University
Ken White
Animals in Literature
Through fiction, poetry, drama and literary nonfiction, this course examines the varied and significant roles that animals have played in human life throughout history and continue to play in contemporary society. Works by U.S. authors as well as some from other cultures are read to explore the ways in which literature uses companion animals and wildlife, real as well as imagined, to shape and reflect social values. Readings are approached from sociological and literary perspectives. Students are asked to develop creative writing exercises with animals as theme and/or character along with a small literary body of their own.
Temple University
Dan Featherston
Animal Welfare & Human-Animal Community
Our communities include not only humans but also
nonhuman animals. Unfortunately, more than 30,000 nonhuman animals are
surrendered each year to shelters in our local communities and over 60% are
euthanized. This community-based learning (CBL) course will focus on companion
animals, working in collaboration with our community partner, the Pennsylvania
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (PSPCA). Based on a learning
model of interaction and reciprocal exchange, we will combine class work with
community work at the PSPCA, exploring animal welfare issues that impact the
lives of humans and animals in our community. Drawing on the interdisciplinary
field of human-animal studies, including rhetorical, cultural, and
philosophical studies of "the animal," nonhuman animals and
human-animal relations in literature and literary theory, and the history of
animal welfare and animal law, students will explore companion animal issues
and conduct community projects pertaining to companion animals in the hopes of
helping both humans and nonhuman animals in our community. Written work will
include three major essays in which students will investigate human-animal
studies, including nonhuman animals in rhetoric and literature, and the
interface between human-animal studies and community-based learning.
University of Calgary
Pamela Banting
The Human and its Others: The Question of the Animal
In this seminar we will begin to think with animals first and foremost by considering them in their Otherness. Beginning with a brief investigation into poststructuralist, postmodern, postcolonial, feminist, and ecocritical interrogations of Otherness and the ethics of representation, we will examine the humanist bias and the blind spots regarding the animal in existing theories of the Other. Then we will interrogate theorizations of the animal in relation to the question of language. One of the traditional demarcations between humans and other animals has been the notion that humans are the only ones capable of language and that this trait sets us above other species. Research in zoosemiotics and the long-term studies of naturalists, however, challenge this proprietorial exclusivity, and deep ecologists like Christopher Manes question why we privilege language over photosynthesis or sporogenesis. Thinkers such as James Hatley, Val Plumwood and Jacques Derrida propose that edibility be factored into concepts of subjectivity, including, in Hatley's words, "the uncanny goodness of being edible to bears." Emmanuel Levinas proposes the face as the basis for an ethics of self and Other, but the faces of animals (except pets) are widely believed to be the faces of species, not individuals. In summary, we will examine questions of subjectivity, the gaze and the face, constructions of the animal Other in nature photography, communication between humans and other mammals, the question of emotion as it pertains to animals other than humans, problems of anthropomorphism and antianthropomorphism, problems of realism in relation to representing the animal Other, captive and/or domestic vs. wild animals, ethics and etiquette in human/non-human relationships, postmodern animals, inter-species collaborations (e.g. musicians and birds), conservation rhetoric and the difficult of representing creatures who do not create documents and whose languages we do not comprehend, how theorizing the animal Other alters our sense of ourselves and our own species, and other topics.
University of California, San Diego
Latin American Literature
Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond
Latin American Literature in Translation: Brazilian Humanimals: Species and Postcoloniality in Brazilian Literature. This course looks at Brazilian texts wherein representations of animals intersect with postcolonial (racialized, classed and gendered) power relations. Situating our readings vis-��� -vis other media-essays, cinema, music--we will consider the animal not simply as metaphor for "human" objectification but question precisely the human/ animal divide that enables colonialist systems of domination. Though we will focus principally on Brazilian texts, we will situate them in the context of cross-cultural discussions in ecocriticism and species studies. How do gender, race and species intersect in literary representations? What is at stake in scrutinizing the ethical dimensions of human/ animal relations?
University of New England
Susan McHugh
Animals, Literature and Culture
This course examines how animals define the crossroads of literary representations and cultural formations. Writers have always turned to animal life to find moving symbols of human conditions and, with the insights of animal science research, more recently to gain a broader understanding of cognition and social development. By investigating this history of literary animal studies, this course aims to account for why species differences, especially between humans and animals, remain among the most enduring markers of social difference. In telling stories of dogs, for instance, as variously gods, pets, meat, or pests, humans mark irreconcilable cultural differences among themselves as well as set the limits of what (and who) counts as natural object and cultural subject. As we consider how species boundaries also intersect with historical constructions of gender, race, class, sex, and ethnicity, our readings and discussions will also illuminate how animal literatures model emerging forms of identity and society.
University of North Florida
Bart Welling
Wild Encounters: Uncaging the Beast in Modern Literature
Why do "trained" wild animals turn on their human masters? Why do good pets go bad? What happens when humans give expression to "the beast within"? Our airwaves and movie houses in the U. S. have long been full of sensationalistic or simply trivial answers to problems like these. Meanwhile, generations of writers and theorists have been dealing with animal behavior, human/animal interactions, and questions of human/animal identity in ways that challenge our most fundamental assumptions about who we are, what-or who-"they" are, and how "we" ought to be treating "them." In this class we will not just encounter some of the most famous beasts in modern literature, from Melville's white whale to Faulkner's Old Ben to James Dickey's nightmarish backwoodsmen in Deliverance, but will frame our encounters with them by means of critical engagement with leading animal rights philosophers, biologists, ecocritics and ecofeminists, and other participants in the growing field of what might be called animal studies. Rather than advocating a particular political agenda, our goal will be to create an open and informed dialogue about the functions nonhuman animals and "beastliness" serve in American culture, and, more broadly, about the roles literature plays in helping humankind make sense of its place in a world full of other life forms.
University of Wisconsin Parkside
Maria del Carmen Martinez
Animals in Literature and Folktale
In this Ethnic American Literature course, we will be studying literary and cultural texts that employ racially marked and gendered animal figures as central elements. The course includes considerable attention to the ideological underpinnings of modern social contract theory and thought that locate women and people of color as existing "closer" to nature than culture. In these models, "dusky" bodies -- particularly maternal bodies -- represent the antithesis of reason and political order. We will also examine eugenic notions of a hierarchical "family of man" in which certain "races" were seen as "naturally" child-like (and therefore, in need of governing). Native American trickster stories and African American folktales will be attended to at length.
University of Wisconsin River Falls
Greta Gaard
The Literature of Environmental Justice
The concept of environmental justice-that nature is not only found in "wilderness," but also in the places where we live, work, and play-revises our understanding of environmentalism to include both National Parks and nuclear waste sites, wild and scenic rivers as well as mega-dams and levees, industrialized food production and human health, automobiles and indigenous rights. Environmental justice literature provides narratives of individuals and communities organizing and responding to economic and environmental problems on local, national, and international levels. Its stories and investigations show that environmental issues are deeply connected with issues of globalization, gender, race, and class.
University of Wisconsin River Falls
Greta Gaard
Investigating Ideas: Reading, Writing and the Disciplines
This is a freshman composition course which teaches writing, but also covers animal issues. One of the texts we use is "Fast Food Nation," since that text allows me to address the ways that industrialized animal agriculture harms animals, humans who eat them, humans who slaughter them (largely undocumented immigrants), the soil, the air (methane emissions), and contributes to world hunger.
Webster University
Karla Armbruster
Humans and Other Animals
Almost all works of literature include animals, no doubt because of the many ways that human lives are intertwined with those of other animals. But we often don't pay close attention to how these animals are represented in the literature we read, particularly if they exist on the peripheries of the human story rather than serving as the focus. In this course, we will put what we might call "literary beasts" in the spotlight, reading a wide variety of fiction, poetry, and essays that somehow address the relationship between humans and other animals, whether the animals function as symbols, realistic "beasts," competitors or allies in the human struggle for existence, fellow creatures with acknowledged moral standing, or even the narrators of stories and the speakers of poems.
Webster University
Karla Armbruster
Perspectives:
Werewolves, Seal Wives, Grizzly Men and Other Metamorphoses.
In
this course, we will examine a wide variety of legends, poems, stories, and
films that portray human-animal transformations, ranging from classical
mythology to Kafka�s �The Metamorphosis,� to stories of humans being eaten by
other animals. While they will come from
a range of cultures and time periods, they all provide insight into the varied
ways humans have relationship between themselves and other animals (and, by
extension, nature), sometimes reinforcing the human-animal distinction that
some philosophers say is central to our definition of the human, and other
times challenging or complicating that distinction. Our goal, then, is to
explore the literature of human-animal metamorphoses in order to question and
explore not only our relationships with other animals but also to re-evaluate
what it means to be human.
Willamette UniversityTobias Menely
Humans and other Animals
We will investigate the ways writers have shepherded readers into an animal world-the perspective of a fish or dog or elephant-and, in doing so, have crossed a boundary that Western philosophy has worked assiduously to maintain. We will also analyze moments when human beings find their sense of what it means to be human troubled by encounters with other animals, be it Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms or Jacques Derrida, naked and feeling the shame of being stared at by his pet pussycat. Throughout the class, we will attend to the ethical, social, and representational questions raised by conscious, communicative animals.
