ENG 228 - Animal Narratives

This course addresses the representation of “animals” in various disciplines, cultural traditions and media. It considers depictions of non-human animals as artifacts of cultural production that reveal at least as much about human understanding of the human as they do about the non-human. That representations are the consequence of cultural shaping seems evident in the obvious fictionalizing engaged by “allegorical realism,” in which non-human animals stand as traditional emblems of human characteristics (eg the Owl as sagacity; the Fox as cunning, etc) or even specific humans at specific historical moments (eg Walt Kelly’s Pig as a specific type of mid-century Southern legacy politician). What is less evident is that all forms of animal representation, including texts governed by the defining/disciplinary objectivity of Ethology and Behavioral Science, perform a shaping of animal narrative.

Credit(s): 3
Course Attribute(s):

This is a writing-enhanced course.
Arts & Humanities Perspectives course for the Dialogues.