The Animal Other
in Texts of Discovery and Encounter
Session Coordinator:
Stacy Hoult
Meier Hall
Stacy.Hoult@valpo.edu
"A New Voyage Around the World:
The Animal Encounters of William Dampier, Pirate
Naturalist"
The Englishman William Dampier circumnavigated the globe in the 1690s with a crew of buccaneers. Unlike many of his peers, he escaped prosecution -- a remarkable feat, as the English government suddenly had the ability (and the desire) to pursue the pirates in earnest for the first time. Dampier's salvation came in the form of his travel journal, entitled A New Voyage Around the World. For thirty years, the Royal Society had requested mariners avoid the tendency towards semi-fiction that habitually characterized travel journals. Dampier understood the value in a text that provided accurate information on unusual flora, fauna and geography; because he presented such precise data in A New Voyage, he was praised and protected by several of the most prestigious scientific minds of his day (and later by Charles Darwin). A New Voyage is bursting with Dampier's notes on the exotic animals he encountered in his multiple circumnavigations. Given his unparalleled scope of knowledge, he was forced to creatively expand his vocabulary, and imagine a self-referential system of global classification. He also displays a great deal of scientific acumen and narrative creativity in considering the interdependence of various plant and animal species (as in the case of tropical birds who seem to mirror many facets of pirate society, or the many species that seem to validate a Lockean ideal). These encounters reveal not only his own shifting identity, but also allow a unique insight into the role of the European explorer at the dawn of the Enlightenment.
Elissa De Falco
"'The Falcon Devoured Its Nest': Animals in Poetic
Responses to the Conquest of the
The culture shock that resulted from the encounter between
Spanish conquistadors and the flora, fauna and indigenous civilizations of the
Stacy Hoult
“Ethical Re-imagination in J.M. Coetzee’s
Fiction”
In J.M. Coetzee’s fiction, animals are everywhere. Vipers, vixens, rams, goats, ducks, and dogs; even frogs, caterpillars, beetles, worms, and cockroaches. These animal beings are frequently introduced to liken human conditions to those of animals, but they are also employed to lead his characters to enhanced, ethical understanding of commonality between humans and animals: a material thing. Mindful of Coetzee’s increased engagement with animal beings in his recent fictional narratives like Disgrace (1999), The Lives of Animals (1999), and Elizabeth Costello (2003), I would argue that Coetzee’s ethical imagination—in which animal beings work as the other to humans’ selves—is not based on the mysterious, enigmatic Levinasian notion of the Other, but grounded on un-transcendental bodiliness of beings. In this respect, then, the ethics Coetzee intimates in his works seems to be closer to the notion of “materialist ethics” that Terry Eagleton theorizes in his recent book, After Theory (2003). I would further argue that Coetzee’s ethical imagination, grounded on embodiedness, opens up a new possibility of moving forward the current deadlock debate in humanities over universality and particularity, for Coetzee’s re-direction enables us to understand the other as the irreducibly different, while finding a universal ground on which we can ethically respond to the other.
J.P. Song