Dr Anu Pande Animals in Literature скачать в хорошем качестве

Dr Anu Pande Animals in Literature

Since the latter half of the twentieth century, there has been a paradigm shift in the academic field. Previously marginalized, silenced, or overlooked groups have increasingly been made visible and audible by such diverse approaches as Feminist Studies, Subaltern Studies, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory and Disability Studies, to name just a few. The development of Animal Studies can also be seen as a step in this direction. Since ancient times, animals have figured in literary texts from various linguistic and cultural traditions. At the same time, philosophy and various academic fields have presumed the existence of an anthropological difference and adopted an anthropocentric outlook as the dominant approach. However, the postmodern world is too complex to be arranged in convenient binaries of subject/object, nature/culture, centre/periphery or human/animal. Recent theoretical and methodological approaches posit, instead, that everything in the social and natural worlds exists in constantly shifting networks of relationships, and nothing exists outside those relationships. Nature and culture don’t co-exist alongside each other; instead, they are inextricably entangled (“naturecultures”). The same holds true of the human/animal binary, which is increasingly being replaced with the terms “human and non-human animals”, or even “humanimal” (Haraway) acknowledging that (a) human and non-human animals have interacted with and upon each other for millennia, thereby mutually shaping each other; (b) one cannot be studied in isolation from the other; and (c) human and non-human animals share the same fragile planet and ecology and – when faced with ecological threat – they find themselves in the same boat. In a webinar titled Why Animals Matter in Literature and Culture organized by the Vellore Institute of Technology on 27th February 2021, I trace the genesis of the Animal Turn in humanities, highlight some of the salient developments in the field of Animal Studies since Peter Singer’s proposal of the term ‘speciesism’ in 1975, and attempt to show why the human subject should not be the exclusive focus of inquiry in humanities. Furthermore, I argue that the classroom is an important arena to inculcate a more inclusive, sustainable, equitable and sensitive world-view in the young generation, and literary texts the best medium. Based on my own experiences as a teacher of the German language, literature and cultural history, I discuss how this can be accomplished in the classroom by adopting targeted reading strategies in engaging with literary texts.