http://thephilosophicalanimal.com/category/d-h-lawrence/

Animals in Looking-Glass World: Fables of Überhumanism and Posthumanism in Heidegger and Nietzsche, by Richard Iveson
http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue02/iveson.html

Some points of note:

• "The nonhuman animal remains, however, and remains a problem. Given the essential withholding of apprehension from the animal, it is clear that the “poverty” [Armut] attributed to it by Heidegger can only ever be a “deprivation” [Entbehrung] when viewed from the perspective of the human, and thus, in truth, is neither poverty nor privation. This then, and as Heidegger himself points out, appears to disallow the positing of the tripartite thesis from the first, in that such an essential characterization is in fact conceived only in comparison with man and “not drawn from animality itself and maintained within the limits of animality”. Curiously, Heidegger does not object to this charge: to imagine otherwise, he says, is perhaps the privilege only of poets."

General directions:

http://english.uoregon.edu/focus/literature-and-the-environment

http://english.berkeley.edu/courses/3612

http://www.nzchas.canterbury.ac.nz/bibliography.shtml

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25475137

Animal Alterity, Sherryl Vint

http://xuwovogal.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/animal-alterity-science-fiction-and-the-question-of-the-animal.pdf

The Bear

Moby Dick

The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr

Heart of a Dog - Bulgakov

The Island of Doctor Moreau

Ursula Le Guin - Author of Acacia Seeds

Flush

Sirius

The Lives of Animals

The Dolphin's Way

Driftglass

Surface Tension

A Meeting with Medusa

Disgrace

White Fang / Call of the Wild

Hemingway

Back home

I am back home. I was greeted by all the dogs we keep and feed. It was really heartening.

Introduction

As I sit at the Chicago O' Hare airport waiting to issue my boarding passes, I am reminded of yesterday, when my flight arrived late and I had to take up a room at a nearby hotel. I am especially reminded of how hungry I was, and how I took revenge on that emaciated state by devouring, quite literally like a caveman, a gigantic burger using my now quickly evaporating collection of dollars.

I am reminded of that burger, and that burger is perhaps one of the most vivid images of America, or at the very least, the America that I have encountered, that I take back with me. And while it's tempting to give in to that kind of jargon now, the bleeding heart but stern dialectic ruing the treatment of animals and their slaughter, I will refrain. Because if there is something else this one month trip to America has taught me, fraught as it was with all sorts of coming-of-age-sequences, it is that it is finally time to stop treating literature as a way out, or even as a solution. It is time to stop feeling morally righteous about a literary work. It has no room in our lives. It is a farce.

But this is immediately a daunting proposition. What interests me about literature the most right now is possibly its ability to engage with things and sensations that might appropriate the non-human, or the 'animal'. I chanced upon this through science fiction, which taught me the importance of asking questions over arriving at solutions. And then, one fine day, here in Kansas, I visited an university, and talked with two professors regarding my desire to study science fiction for a PhD, but I also added that science fiction per se wasn't really taught or encouraged in very many places. It turns out that SF is taught and practiced under a different set of umbrella terms: ecocriticism, animal studies, posthumanism and so on and so forth. So if I want to do something on those lines, those are my choices. Fair enough. But the problem with something like ecocriticism is that it is perhaps impossible to critique our treatment with nature on literary grounds without becoming somewhat more involved. Soon, literature gives way to activism. And I have had my share of Facebook activists, and frankly, I detest them with a rare and exuberant blend of hatred and incredulity.

What I do when I am feeling troubled regarding something I once used to love but do not find myself appreciating in quite the same way is this: I start thinking and reading up on it a lot. Sometimes even irrelevant things which have no immediate impression on me, but with time, sink in in a fashion that is very very tangible. So it is with 'animal studies'. It is something I feel very strongly about, but it is not something that lends itself to more pragmatic ventures such as working for animal preservation. The latter is something that I have long since wished to do but haven't had the courage to pursue. So I stick with the former, and hope to dabble in it. Much like the best literature isn't always, not even by a long shot, written by the best people, so 'criticism' and understanding the state of things, or how things are represented, must perhaps always be a fatal remove from what it talks about.

So it is now, sitting at the airport, that the last, bubbling remains of today's burger made me want to make this blog, perhaps already doomed for extinction because of its flimsy origin. Let's see where I take it, or where it takes me.