Conclusion ‘Other Fashionings of Life’: Science Fiction, Human–Animal Studies and the Future of Subjectivity

2010 ◽  
pp. 207-227
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Life Science ◽  
The Future ◽  
Human Animal

scholarly journals The Horse behind the Text: Animal Agency in Early Medieval Historiography

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-85
Author(s):  
Marieke Röben
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
The Future ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Medieval Historiography ◽  
Animal Agency

Early medieval authors frequently used horses as narrative devices. Therefore, when working with historiographical sources, one is confronted with a vital question: how can we reconstruct the horses’ agency without knowing whether their depiction is a mere narrative device? Combining praxeological approaches with the analysis of narrative structures, this paper offers a glance “beyond the text.” It shows how analysing the underlying knowledge of the medieval reader contributes to reconstructing a contemporary image of early medieval horses and their (perceived) agency in human society and thereby develops a new perspective for the future of historical human-animal studies.

scholarly journals Siriusly Concerned: Animal Non-Belongingness in a Dichotomized Environment

2021 ◽  
pp. 69
Author(s):  
Jesús Fernández Caro
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Ideal Tool ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The Many ◽  
Unique Species ◽  
The Ideal

This article approaches Sirius (1944), by Olaf Stapledon, from a perspective that brings together literary animal studies and ecocriticism. The eponymous main character of this science fiction novel is a genetically-modified dog who struggles between the human and the animal realms, being unable to belong to either urban or natural spaces. I argue this work of fiction carries out an exercise of blurring boundaries, thus proposing alternatives for harmful binaries such as human-animal, city-nature, or divine-mundane. Each of these binaries is explored in three trips of the many this character experiences throughout the novel. This allows the main character to reflect on his peculiar, unique species as the singularity he is. Sirius claims it is only empathy that can help in such a task; both human and nonhuman animals are then able to rejoice in biological, cultural, and spiritual differences. Sirius’s trips are analyzed in order to look closely at (1) the dog’s reflections on humankind while being in London, (2) his becoming a wolf, dog, and human at the same time in the woods, and (3) music as the ideal tool to articulate one’s spirituality based on a reconnection with an almost lost biodiversity.

scholarly journals Репрезентация животных в рассказе Севера Гансовского Зверек (1969)

2020 ◽  
pp. 191-201
Author(s):  
Karolina Gansovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Cognitive Model ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The Creation

The literary works of Sever Gansovsky are an excellent example of modern eco-literature. For many years, the writer worked with the genre of eco-science fiction, which is engaged into the study of the nature of human existence and the interaction of humans with non-human animals. The methods of Human-Animal Studies, applied to science fiction works, allowed us to analyze the writer’s novels in the context of the latest research in eco-literature and bioethics. The object of this study is the novel Little Animal, written in 1969. The novel tells a story of a small boy who is particularly cruel to animals. Little Animal represents the creation of a man as an exponent of a new eco-culture. The novel shows the formation of a new cognitive model of the world, in whichanimals are playing a mediating role between the man and the nature that is beyond the limits of human experience.

scholarly journals “Are we not Men?”: Reading the Human-Animal Interface in Science Fiction through John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?”

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 157-171
Author(s):  
Andrei Smolnikov
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Frontiers Of Science ◽  
Human Animal

The so-called animal turn in literature has fostered the evolution of animal studies, a discipline aimed at interrogating the ontological, ethical, and metaphysical implications of animal depictions. Animal studies deals with representation and agency in literature, and its insights have fundamental implications for understanding the conception and progression of human-animal interactions. Considering questions raised by animal studies in the context of literary depictions of animals in science fiction, this article threads John Berger’s characterization of the present as a time of radical marginalization of animals in his essay “Why Look at Animals?” through two highly influential science fiction texts: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Applying Berger’s reasoning to these two novels raises issues of personhood, criteria for ontological demarcation, and the dynamics of power, providing an opportunity to clarify, modify, and refute a number of his finer claims. This process of refinement allows us to track conceptions of human-animal interactions through the literary landscape and explore their extrapolations into various speculative contexts, including the frontiers of science and post-apocalyptic worlds.

scholarly journals Animal Representation in Recent Anglophone Science Fiction: Uplifting and Anthropomorphism in Nnedi Okorafor’s "Lagoon" and Adam Roberts’s "Bête"

Oceánide ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 78-83
Author(s):  
Rosa María Moreno Redondo
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Animal Cognition ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Needs ◽  
Animal Intelligence ◽  
Use Of Technology ◽  
Human Animal

Science fiction in the last decades has often empowered machines and provided humans with enhanced characteristics through the use of technology (the limits of artificial intelligence and transhumanism are frequent themes in recent narratives), but animal empowerment has also been present through the concept of uplifting, understood as the augmentation of animal intelligence through technology. Uplifting implies providing animals with the capacity to speak and reason like humans. However, it could be argued that such implementation fails to acknowledge animal cognition in favour of anthropomorphized schemes of thought. Humankind’s lack of recognition of different animal types of communication has been portrayed in fiction and often implies the adaptation of the animal Other to human needs and expectations, creating a post-animal that communicates its needs to the reader through borrowed words. The main objective of this article is to analyze the use of uplifting as a strategy to give voice to animals in two science fiction novels written in English, both published in the twenty-first century: Lagoon (2014) by Nigerian-American Nnedi Okorafor and Bête (2014) by British author Adam Roberts. This article examines, from ecocritical and human-animal studies (HAS) perspectives, the differencesand similarities in the exploration of the theme in both novels, which are often related to humankind’s willingness or refusal to regard the Other as equal.

The future of animal studies in psychology.

1992 ◽  
Vol 47 (12) ◽  
pp. 1679-1679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glyn V. Thomas ◽  
Derek Blackman
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
The Future

Living machines in our cultural imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Szollosy
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Future ◽  
Public Imagination ◽  
The Human Condition

Public perceptions of robots and artificial intelligence (AI)—both positive and negative—are hopelessly misinformed, based far too much on science fiction rather than science fact. However, these fictions can be instructive, and reveal to us important anxieties that exist in the public imagination, both towards robots and AI and about the human condition more generally. These anxieties are based on little-understood processes (such as anthropomorphization and projection), but cannot be dismissed merely as inaccuracies in need of correction. Our demonization of robots and AI illustrate two-hundred-year-old fears about the consequences of the Enlightenment and industrialization. Idealistic hopes projected onto robots and AI, in contrast, reveal other anxieties, about our mortality—and the transhumanist desire to transcend the limitations of our physical bodies—and about the future of our species. This chapter reviews these issues and considers some of their broader implications for our future lives with living machines.

scholarly journals Development and Application of the Owner-Bird Relationship Scale (OBRS) to Assess the Relation of Humans to Their Pet Birds

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Kathrin Burmeister ◽  
Katrin Drasch ◽  
Monika Rinder ◽  
Sebastian Prechsl ◽  
Andrea Peschel ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Four Dimensions ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
Pet Birds ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Only a few birds besides domestic pigeons and poultry can be described as domesticated. Therefore, keeping a pet bird can be challenging, and the human-avian relationship will have a major influence on the quality of this cohabitation. Studies that focus on characterizing the owner-bird relationship generally use adapted cat/dog scales which may not identify its specific features. Following a sociological approach, a concept of human-animal relationship was developed leading to three types of human-animal relationship (impersonal, personal, and close personal). This concept was used to develop a 21-item owner-bird-relationship scale (OBRS). This scale was applied to measure the relationship between pet bird owners (or keepers) (n = 1,444) and their birds in an online survey performed in Germany. Factor analysis revealed that the relationship between owner and bird consisted of four dimensions: the tendency of the owner to anthropomorphize the bird; the social support the bird provides for the owner; the empathy, attentiveness, and respect of the owner toward the bird; and the relationship of the bird toward the owner. More than one quarter of the German bird owners of this sample showed an impersonal, half a personal, and less than a quarter a close personal relationship to their bird. The relationship varied with the socio-demographic characteristics of the owners, such as gender, marital status, and education. This scale supports more comprehensive quantitative research into the human-bird relationship in the broad field of human-animal studies including the psychology and sociology of animals as well as animal welfare and veterinary medicine.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document