Summer Section

ENGL 790: Animals Studies and Literature

Instructor: Phillip Drake (pdrake@ku.edu) 

This course examines animals in literature along with the emergence of animal studies as a field of inquiry. Embodying a complicated set of interdisciplinary tools and perspectives, animal studies scholarship prompts exploration into the lives of animals, focusing particularly on interactions between human and nonhuman animals.

These bodies and relationships provoke complicated and often uncomfortable questions that challenge conventional understandings of a host of issues, including kinship, care, embodiment, individuality, power, precarity, death, extinction, and living well. Furthermore, interactions between human and nonhuman animals often intersect with constructions of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sex, inviting consideration of justice and social awareness at various scales, from the body and household to the nation and globe.

In addition to covering a diverse range of literature, we will explore various disciplinary (literary, anthropological, biological, ethological, psychological, etc.) and theoretical (queer, postcolonial, feminist, existentialist, poststructural, posthuman, ecocritical, etc.) lineages that animate (and are animated by) multispecies studies.

This course is designed to appeal to graduate students with diverse interests and investments in animals and animal encounters (textual or otherwise). Beyond short written work and presentations/moderations, students will complete their choice of final project:

1. a research article/paper
2. a creative riff on a research paper
3. a creative paper that engages rigorously with relevant theoretical issues/traditions.

Likely texts will include: Ackerley, We Think the World of You; Barclay, Melal; Coetzee, The Lives of Animals; Kang, The Vegetarian; Le Guin, Word for World is Forest; Schweblin, Fever Dream;Ward, Salvage the Bones; Wells, Island of Dr. Moreau;Woolf, Flush; and other literary and critical works that will be posted on Blackboard.