Animal Presence and Human Identity in Modern Literature explores
literary representations of the human-animal encounter in modernity that
press human "being" to its limits. This project arises within the
question, "Can an animal die?," formulated in response to Martin
Heidegger's famous assertion that, properly speaking, animals cannot
"die" but can only "perish," an assertion that sharply summarizes
western "humanist" philosophical discourse - particularly as etched in
the "modern turn" initiated by Descartes - in which the "human" emerges
precisely as that (non)animal which enjoys a distinctive relation to
both the inner essence and outer edge of existence. Recently - most
notably in the late works of Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques
Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Emmanuel Levinas - philosophers have
interrogated the grounds of Heidegger's formulation, putting into
question its assumption of unnavigable distance and un-negotiable
difference between humans and (other) animals, drawing partly on
Darwinian conceptions of a biologistic continuum among creatures, partly
on ethological revelations of animal "capacities," and partly on ideas
intrinsic to philosophy itself, such as a demystification of binarism as
an instrument of philosophical structure and analysis.
The book's overarching thesis is that, taken together, texts - including
Shakespeare's King Lear; Eliot's Middlemarch; Wells's The Island of
Doctor Moreau; Atwood's Surfacing; and Desai's Clear Light of Day -
are both distinctive in their figurations of the human-animal relation
and representative of a wide spectrum of literary instantiations of the
"question of the animal" for post-Enlightenment western culture.
