Animalizing the Canon: Toward Multispecies Subjectivities and Ethical Engagement in English Literary Education
Abstract
This dissertation explores how animals are largely erased from literary education and curricular practice and how they could be actively incorporated into literary pedagogy. Animal stories, including those focused on farmed animals, are prominently represented in children’s education. Yet the animals in these stories are typically anthropomorphized in ways that help guide children toward humanist readings and away from questions surrounding the animals, especially any critical issues pertaining to animal exploitation and/or harm.
Animal Farm and Charlotte’s Web are two canonical educational texts that represent not only farmed animals, but also quite explicitly, the manifestations of physical and psychological torment inflicted upon them by humans. Yet the animals are filtered through the anthropomorphic prism to adhere to the hierarchal anthropocentric imperative that sees value in animals only as resources to reproduce humanist value. Animals are endemically erased and replaced through a process of humanist allegorical substitution that I call the anthropo-allegorical frame.
Accordingly, this dissertation examines the ethical and ontological limits of humanistic and anthropocentric literary education, particularly in the context of anthropogenic environmental emergencies that threaten the existence of innumerable animal species, including our own. Moreover, this project aims to promote a reconceptualization of humanist literary education that challenges the entrenched anthropocentric educational practices by reorienting our relations to animals in ways that respect their subjectivity, agency, and right to life, and by cultivating inter- and intraspecies empathy.