FRSEMR 62F. Talking, Literary Animals

Instructor: James Simpson
Tuesdays, 9:45-11:45 am | Location: Barker 218

What do imagined animals have to teach human readers? Why, when literary writers think about hunger, violence, sex, suffering, technology, expressivity, the gods, and education (for example), do they so often draw upon animal behavior to understand human practice? The representation of animals in literature tends to range from the cute to the terrifying, with the beautiful in between: animals are cute when they act like us, beautiful when they express desire, but often terrifying when we realize that we act like them. Cute representation of animals tends to characterize children’s literature, while the beautiful and the terrifying material is on the whole reserved for the grown-ups (though those boundary lines are by no means uncrossed). Cute animals tend to be small, the beautiful mid-size, and terrifying huge. Either way—cute, beautiful or terrifying—we need animals to think, no doubt because we are ourselves animals, even if we often pretend not to be. Our habitual ways of looking to animals in order to think about ourselves almost always deploy analogy and/or metaphor; the thought experiment sometimes takes the form of having animals actually cross species lines (animals becoming human, or, more commonly, vice versa). This seminar will focus on extraordinarily brilliant animal literature (funny, mordant, touching, sophisticated) in great European literature, from the last 2000 years. The seminar will also teach students how to read literature. On many weeks we will explore the book history of our texts, including texts held in the astonishing riches of Harvard Library System holdings. Throughout the seminar we will also make frequent reference to visual images of animals. The class will be entirely open to news from evolutionary biology that students bring to it, but its focus is not on the non-human natural world in and for itself; the focus is, rather, on the way in which humans represent animals in order to understand human behavior.