Challenging the human through the animal: human-animal relationships in recent British literature

From its very beginnings in Greek and Roman antiquity, imaginative literature has been a powerful tool to investigate what it means to be human. This is still true, but in recent decades, under the aegis of ecocriticism, environmental literary studies and critical animal studies, attempts to understand human nature that posit the fundamental exceptionality of our species have been called into doubt and considered reductive. An indicator for this changed perspective is the prominent status which animals and inter-species relationships have acquired in recent poetry, in prose fiction, but also in philosophy, sociology and critical theory. In the seminar, we will read a number of texts which, in addition to their fictional human characters, feature animals – as co-inhabitants, mirror images, projection surfaces, symbols, victims of anthropomorphism, border crossers between wilderness and civilization, personifications of natureculture (Donna Haraway), but also 'only' as animals. Against the backdrop of a theoretical understanding of human-animal studies, we will discuss the function of these fictionalized fellow creatures on the level of the literary.