THE “ANIMAL TURN” IN HISTORY

“Over the past few years, the humanities have been confronting a paradigm shift. After the cultural and linguistic turns of the 1970s and 1980s, ideas about language, meaning, representation, power, agency, othering, and knowledge-production redefined the humanities. Now […] new media, climate change, environmental catastrophe, terrorism, biotechnology, population growth, and globalization are destabilizing the core of the humanities. These forces are larger-than-human—they are seismic and are shifting intellectual terrain. They also require a change of perception—a new, less anthropocentric, vision for a new century.”  

(Vandersommers, Dan. 2016. “The “animal turn in history”. Downloaded 12.03.19 from https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/november-2016/the-animal-turnin-history)

THE ELECTIVE COURSE

We are going to study Franz Kafka ´s animal stories. These stories have inspired thinkers and writers since the 1970s with their destabilisation of accepted notions of human distinctiveness from non-human animals.  In addition to reading and discussing the stories, we will make sketches to explore the possibilities set forth in the stories.