Phenomenology, Alterity, and Contemporary Aesthetic Approaches to the Nonhuman

This thesis investigates how post-1960s writers, performers and producers have represented the subjective experiences of nonhuman animals, and explores the intersections of animality with human social identity markers, including disability, gender and race. The central idea it addresses is that of alterity, the radical otherness and unknowability of subjectivities other to the subject’s own. To theorise this topic, I turn to a philosophical movement that had gone almost entirely overlooked by animal-studies researchers: existential phenomenology. My thesis extends understandings of literature and phenomenology into new ground, using each as a tool to read and test the other, and looking for philosophical and aesthetic insights from thinkers and producers thus-far disregarded within the field of "animal studies". Chapter one reads J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967), Timothy Treadwell’s Among Grizzlies (1997), alongside Martin Heidegger’s writings on “the animal”. Chapter two reads Sarah Hall’s ‘Mrs Fox’ (2013), and Larissa Lai’s When Fox is a Thousand (1997) alongside Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of the intersection of animality and gender. Chapter three reads Nautilus (2017), by mime artist Trygve Wakenshaw, through the lens of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology. Chapter four analyses Patrick Chamoiseau’s The Old Slave and the Mastiff (2019) alongside Frantz Fanon’s writings on racialisation and humanism. The conclusion synthesises the new understandings of the nonhuman and human that these texts make possible. It also highlights how nonhuman subjectivities reframe the scope and methods of literature itself, as producers of aesthetic works push the envelope of literary, filmic and performative expression to represent what most scientists and philosophers have long thought knowable: the subjective experiences of nonhuman animals.