The literary representation of pro-animal thought : readings in contemporary fiction.

This thesis analyses the representation of pro-animal thought in literary
fiction published over the last thirty years.
Recently, critics have begun eclectically to trace animal rights
arguments in past literature, attaching criticism to politics in a familiar way
(considering the recent history of the literary academy). However, they have
neither explained the holistic picture of human-animal relations in
individual texts, nor how such questions relate to a specific literary context.
This thesis, on the other hand, involves more a pinpointing of the particular
value of literary works for extending the horizon of current ethical debates
about animals than a partisan mobilisation of literary criticism in the service
of animal rights. To that end, each chapter offers a thoroughgoing reading of
an important text in the story of contemporary fiction's ethical encounter
with the animal. I contextualise these extended readings with more succinct
discussion of the wide range of contemporary authors who represent proanimal
thought.
This approach requires several theoretical methodologies, though all
are within the realm of feminist post-structuralism. Butler's work on the
discursive production of sex illuminates the ethical representation of species
in Atwood's Surfacing. The representation of animals (both literary and
political) in Walker's The Temple of My Familiar is explained by situating the
animal within feminist debates about the relation of literary writing to the
discursive formation of race. Levy's avant-garde representation of the animal
in Diary of a Steak is explained by placing a literary-theoretical reading
inspired by Bakhtin and Irigaray within a broader cultural study of the BSE
crisis. Derrida's recent work on ethics and the question of the animal helps
me explore the literary representation of ethical vegetarianism in Coetzee's
The Lives of Animals.
My concluding remarks suggest how the results of my research might
impact on the future role of animal ethics in literary criticism.