Moving the Frontier of Conscience: Representations of Animal Ethics in Selected Contemporary Anglophone Literature

• Thesis title in Czech: Posouvání hranic svědomí: Zobrazování etického přístupu ke zvířatům ve vybraných dílech soudobé anglofonní literatury
• Thesis title in English: Moving the Frontier of Conscience: Representations of Animal Ethics in Selected Contemporary Anglophone Literature
• Key words: zvířata v kontextu etiky|týrání a vykořisťování zvířat|antropocentrisums|antropomorfismus|posthumanismus|beletrie 21. století
• English key words: Animal studies|animal ethics|animal cruelty|anthropocentrism|anthropomorphism|becoming animal|becoming minor|experimental narrative structure|industrial food animal production|meat-eating|posthumanism|subaltern voices|twenty-first-century fiction.
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2020/2021
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: doc. Justin Quinn, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 24.02.2021
• Date of assignment: 24.02.2021
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 09.03.2021
• Date and time of defence: 09.06.2022 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 12.04.2022
• Date of proceeded defence: 09.06.2022
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: PhDr. Hana Ulmanová, Ph.D.

Guidelines

The main objective is to perform an analysis of selected works in relation to the topic of animal ethics and cruelty. It is to be a contribution to the recently emerged field of animal studies, within which cross-disciplinary scholarship seek to understand human-animal relationships. The underlying idea in all these biological, philosophical, anthropological and other studies is that human and nonhuman animals live in a relatively closed system of the planet Earth, where everything is connected to everything else, and ‘change is the only constant in life’. Such learning destabilizes a number of human constructs, particularly the concepts of anthropocentrism and hierarchical structures, and finds a sound response also in the domains of animal ethics and literature. What are the distinguishing human traits, what is the difference between animal pain and human suffering, whether man has a moral right to use and abuse animals; these questions are raised from within animal studies, while it becomes clear that the term ‘nonhuman animals’ is sometimes very close to the concepts of being ‘minor’ or ‘other’ applied on humans.
The selected works deal with ethical problems resulting from intentional abuse of animals, such as industrial processing of animals or animal experimentation, but they also describe the indirect lethal consequences of human agency on animal populations. They vary in terms of the genre, narrative structure and perspective, or the geographical locations where the stories take place. Most of their authors belong among the modern ‘nomads’ who have lived in various, often very distant and different countries, which certainly enlarged their cultural experience and perspective. Nevertheless, all the works have something in common: they emphasise the right to life, condemn organized violence and force us to rethink established systems of ethical thought. And they all were published in the new millennium.

References

Primární zdroje:
Faber, Michel. Under the Skin. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2017.

Coetzee, John Maxwell. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Random House, 2015.

Fowler, Karen Joy. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. London: Serpent's Tail, 2014.

Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Dovey Ceridwen. Only the Animals. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014

Sekundární zdroje:
Baker, Timothy C. Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Kalof,Linda ed.The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies.Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2017.

McCorry, Seán and Miller, John (Eds.). Literature and Meat Since 1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

McHugh, Susan, McKay, Robert, Miller, John (Eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009.

Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.