This volume is the first comprehensive guide to current research on animals, animality, and human-animal relations in literature. To reflect the history of literary animal studies to date, its primary focus is literary prose and poetry in English, while also accommodating emergent discussions of the full range of media and contexts with which literary studies engages, especially film and critical theory. User-friendly language, references, even suggestions for further readings are included to help newcomers to the field understand how it has taken shape primarily through recent decades. To further aid teachers, sections are organized by conventions of periodization, and chapters address a range of canonical and popular texts. Bookended by sections devoted to the field's conceptual foundations and new directions, the volume is designed to set an agenda for literary animal studies for decades to come.
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Yes, you can access The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature by Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, John Miller, Susan McHugh,Robert McKay,John Miller, Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, John Miller in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
S. McHugh et al. (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and LiteraturePalgrave Studies in Animals and Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39773-9_2
Begin Abstract
The Exception and the Norm: Dimensions of Anthropocentrism
In his De Architectura, written late in the first century BCE, Vitruvius recounted, alongside much else of interest to the Roman architect or engineer, the proper proportions of âa well formed human bodyâ (hominis bene figurati). The distance from chin to crown, he asserted, is an eighth of the whole body, the length of the foot is a sixth, the width across the extended arms is equal to the total height, and so on.1 âIf Nature, therefore, has made the human body so that the different members of it are measures of the wholeâ, Vitruvius concluded, âso the ancients have, with great propriety, determined that in all perfect works, each part should be some aliquot part of the wholeâ.2 In addition, it is worthy of remark, he said, âthat the measures necessarily used in all buildings and other works, are derived from the members of the human body, as the digit, the palm, the foot, the cubitâ.3 In short, Vitruvius took the proportions and dimensions of the human body to be the template from which the works of architecture, and indeed of other endeavours, should derive.4 Leonardo da Vinciâs is but the most famous of a series of Renaissance illustrations of these principles of human proportion (Fig. 1).5 The drawing that has become known as his âVitruvian Manâ represented not just the perfectly proportioned human figure, but the relationship of that figure to the wider world: man as microcosm.6 In his commentary to the Italian edition of De Architectura published in 1521, Cesare Cesariano was able to assert that in the figure of the human body we can understand the proportions or common measure of everything in the world (diximus sapere commensurare tutte le cose che sono nel mondo).7Vitruviusâ schema, and its deployment by humanist scholars, is patently and unabashedly anthropocentric.8 It is only one of a great variety of modes of anthropocentric thought, however. In what follows, I would like to provide an admittedly schematic account of the dimensions of anthropocentrism that are to be found within a broad body of historical literature, and to explore a little their persistent application to nothing less than everything in the world.
The word anthropocentric derives from the Greek terms áźÎ˝Î¸ĎĎĎÎżĎ (man) and ÎşÎνĎĎον (centre), and entered the English language during the mid-nineteenth century. Writing in 1855, the theologian Carl Bernhard Hundeshagen opposed the âidolatry of humanityâ exemplified within the universities by the ideas of Rousseau, Feuerbach and their followers. Depriving so many of âwarm Christian heartinessâ, it is easy to imagine, he said, âwhat great injury this anthropocentric mode of contemplation would inflictâ.9 On the other hand, in considering the science of astronomy in 1861, the Presbyterian minister William Henderson wrote that âBiblical teaching is [âŚ] anthropocentric, so far as the world is concerned, the true centre of it being, not earth so much as man. The sun, physical centre of the system as he may be, shines for our sakes: the moon walks the night in our interest: the stars are there for our use. From the Biblical point of view, everything turns round the earth as the habitation of human spiritâ.10 And so, in A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, published in 1863, John William Draper suggested that, having emerged from a barbarous âphase of sorceryâ, man moved on to an âanthropocentric phaseâ in which he conceives himself Natureâs most prominent object and understands that âwhatever there is has been made for his pleasure, or to minister to his use. To this belief that every thing is of a subordinate value compared with himself, he clings with tenacity even in his most advanced mental stateâ.11 The range and forms of this tenacity, and the diverse ways in which humanity might be regarded as central, have been considerable. It will be useful, therefore, to understand the varieties or dimensions of anthropocentric contemplation as articulating one or sometimes both of what have been two indispensable conceptions. On the one hand, this centrality has often manifested as the claim that humanity is special, extraordinary, indeed exceptional; on the other, and not without paradox, that human being is self-evidently and reassuringly normal.12
The term human exceptionalismhas been employed to designate those world-views or philosophies or systems of thought that characterise humanity as essentially and fundamentally different in kind from the rest of the natural order. The expression has appeared in works dealing with widely varying topics, frequently to describe a perspective which resists or opposes a fully scientific approach. In his review of a 1954 monograph on the form and significance of the chin, for instance, Arnold Tamarin remarked that âthe school of human exceptionalism will find little comfort from this demonstration that Hominidae obey the same laws of evolution as other familiesâ.13 In a Pavlovian critique of Freud, Harry Kohlsaat Wells suggested in 1960 that the separation of psychology from cerebral physiology ârepresents the last great theoretical stronghold of theology with its essential doctrines of the specially created human soul and its immortalityâ. Accepting that the mind is a function of the brain is a bitter pill to swallow, âfor it eliminates the last refuge of human exceptionalism to the pervading order of natural lawâ.14 And William Catton and Riley Dunlap, writing in 1978, identified a âHuman Exceptionalist Paradigmâ within sociology, a fundamentally anthropocentric worldview underlying competing theoretical perspectives, which assumes that humans are unique among the earthâs creatures in their possession of culture, and optimistically downplays or ignores material and physical constraints on progress and expansion. They opposed to it an environmental or ecological sensibility that would take fully into account habitat as well as humans.15 In keeping with the tenor of these accounts, I would like, in what follows, to use the term âhuman exceptionalismâ to indicate not just those philosophies that exempt humanity from otherwise universal accounts of the natural world, but, in addition, those that emphasise and are especially impressed by humanityâs capabilities and achievements. We are interested here, then, in the exceptional in the senses both of that which stands outside the rule, and that which is most excellent.16AnthrĹpos is central in that humans are taken to lie at the heart of things, to occupy the principal, most significant position. Of this first key conception in anthropocentric thought, which singles out humanity as exceptional, we can identify three separate dimensions.
In the first of these dimensions of anthropocentrism, we find a spatial characterisation of the order of things, in which humanity holds an elevated, perhaps even supreme, position on a purported hierarchy. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, for instance, Immanuel Kant suggested that manâs sense of self, his idea of âIâ, âraises (erhebt) him infinitely above (Ăźber) all the other beings living on earthâ. Such a being is âaltogether different in rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals, which we can dispose of as we pleaseâ.17 For Kant, man enjoys a prerogative âover (Ăźber) all the animalsâ, which he regards not as fellow creatures âbut as means and instruments to be used at willâ.18 In writing of humanityâs lofty position, raised âaboveâ and âoverâ all, Kant employed a well-established spatial trope. Arthur O. Lovej...
Table of contents
Cover
Front Matter
Introduction: Towards an Animal-Centred Literary History
Part I. Theoretical Underpinnings
Part II. Medieval Literature
Part III. Early Modern Literature
Part IV. Literature of the Eighteenth Century
Part V. Romantic Literature
Part VI. Victorian Literature
Part VII. Modernist Literature
Part VIII. Contemporary Literature
Part IX. New Directions
Correction to: Narratology Beyond the Human: Self-Narratives and Inter-Species Identities