The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature

Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, John Miller, Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, John Miller

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030397722
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030397739
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume is the first comprehensive guide to current research on animals, animality, and human-animal relations in literature. To reflect the history of literary animal studies to date, its primary focus is literary prose and poetry in English, while also accommodating emergent discussions of the full range of media and contexts with which literary studies engages, especially film and critical theory. User-friendly language, references, even suggestions for further readings are included to help newcomers to the field understand how it has taken shape primarily through recent decades. To further aid teachers, sections are organized by conventions of periodization, and chapters address a range of canonical and popular texts. Bookended by sections devoted to the field's conceptual foundations and new directions, the volume is designed to set an agenda for literary animal studies for decades to come.

Part ITheoretical Underpinnings

© The Author(s) 2021

S. McHugh et al. (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and LiteraturePalgrave Studies in Animals and Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39773-9_2

Begin Abstract

The Exception and the Norm: Dimensions of Anthropocentrism

Tom Tyler¹

(1)

University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Tom Tyler

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In his De Architectura, written late in the first century BCE, Vitruvius recounted, alongside much else of interest to the Roman architect or engineer, the proper proportions of “a well formed human body” (hominis bene figurati). The distance from chin to crown, he asserted, is an eighth of the whole body, the length of the foot is a sixth, the width across the extended arms is equal to the total height, and so on.¹ “If Nature, therefore, has made the human body so that the different members of it are measures of the whole”, Vitruvius concluded, “so the ancients have, with great propriety, determined that in all perfect works, each part should be some aliquot part of the whole”.² In addition, it is worthy of remark, he said, “that the measures necessarily used in all buildings and other works, are derived from the members of the human body, as the digit, the palm, the foot, the cubit”.³ In short, Vitruvius took the proportions and dimensions of the human body to be the template from which the works of architecture, and indeed of other endeavours, should derive.⁴ Leonardo da Vinci’s is but the most famous of a series of Renaissance illustrations of these principles of human proportion (Fig. 1).⁵ The drawing that has become known as his “Vitruvian Man” represented not just the perfectly proportioned human figure, but the relationship of that figure to the wider world: man as microcosm.⁶ In his commentary to the Italian edition of De Architectura published in 1521, Cesare Cesariano was able to assert that in the figure of the human body we can understand the proportions or common measure of everything in the world (diximus sapere commensurare tutte le cose che sono nel mondo).⁷ Vitruvius’ schema, and its deployment by humanist scholars, is patently and unabashedly anthropocentric.⁸ It is only one of a great variety of modes of anthropocentric thought, however. In what follows, I would like to provide an admittedly schematic account of the dimensions of anthropocentrism that are to be found within a broad body of historical literature, and to explore a little their persistent application to nothing less than everything in the world.

Fig. 1

Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” (c. 1490); pen and ink with wash over metalpoint on paper, 34.4 cm × 25.5 cm, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice

The word anthropocentric derives from the Greek terms ἄνθρωπος (man) and κέντρον (centre), and entered the English language during the mid-nineteenth century. Writing in 1855, the theologian Carl Bernhard Hundeshagen opposed the “idolatry of humanity” exemplified within the universities by the ideas of Rousseau, Feuerbach and their followers. Depriving so many of “warm Christian heartiness”, it is easy to imagine, he said, “what great injury this anthropocentric mode of contemplation would inflict”.⁹ On the other hand, in considering the science of astronomy in 1861, the Presbyterian minister William Henderson wrote that “Biblical teaching is […] anthropocentric, so far as the world is concerned, the true centre of it being, not earth so much as man. The sun, physical centre of the system as he may be, shines for our sakes: the moon walks the night in our interest: the stars are there for our use. From the Biblical point of view, everything turns round the earth as the habitation of human spirit”.¹⁰ And so, in A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, published in 1863, John William Draper suggested that, having emerged from a barbarous “phase of sorcery”, man moved on to an “anthropocentric phase” in which he conceives himself Nature’s most prominent object and understands that “whatever there is has been made for his pleasure, or to minister to his use. To this belief that every thing is of a subordinate value compared with himself, he clings with tenacity even in his most advanced mental state”.¹¹ The range and forms of this tenacity, and the diverse ways in which humanity might be regarded as central, have been considerable. It will be useful, therefore, to understand the varieties or dimensions of anthropocentric contemplation as articulating one or sometimes both of what have been two indispensable conceptions. On the one hand, this centrality has often manifested as the claim that humanity is special, extraordinary, indeed exceptional; on the other, and not without paradox, that human being is self-evidently and reassuringly normal.¹²

The term human exceptionalism has been employed to designate those world-views or philosophies or systems of thought that characterise humanity as essentially and fundamentally different in kind from the rest of the natural order. The expression has appeared in works dealing with widely varying topics, frequently to describe a perspective which resists or opposes a fully scientific approach. In his review of a 1954 monograph on the form and significance of the chin, for instance, Arnold Tamarin remarked that “the school of human exceptionalism will find little comfort from this demonstration that Hominidae obey the same laws of evolution as other families”.¹³ In a Pavlovian critique of Freud, Harry Kohlsaat Wells suggested in 1960 that the separation of psychology from cerebral physiology “represents the last great theoretical stronghold of theology with its essential doctrines of the specially created human soul and its immortality”. Accepting that the mind is a function of the brain is a bitter pill to swallow, “for it eliminates the last refuge of human exceptionalism to the pervading order of natural law”.¹⁴ And William Catton and Riley Dunlap, writing in 1978, identified a “Human Exceptionalist Paradigm” within sociology, a fundamentally anthropocentric worldview underlying competing theoretical perspectives, which assumes that humans are unique among the earth’s creatures in their possession of culture, and optimistically downplays or ignores material and physical constraints on progress and expansion. They opposed to it an environmental or ecological sensibility that would take fully into account habitat as well as humans.¹⁵ In keeping with the tenor of these accounts, I would like, in what follows, to use the term “human exceptionalism” to indicate not just those philosophies that exempt humanity from otherwise universal accounts of the natural world, but, in addition, those that emphasise and are especially impressed by humanity’s capabilities and achievements. We are interested here, then, in the exceptional in the senses both of that which stands outside the rule, and that which is most excellent.¹⁶Anthrōpos is central in that humans are taken to lie at the heart of things, to occupy the principal, most significant position. Of this first key conception in anthropocentric thought, which singles out humanity as exceptional, we can identify three separate dimensions.

In the first of these dimensions of anthropocentrism, we find a spatial characterisation of the order of things, in which humanity holds an elevated, perhaps even supreme, position on a purported hierarchy. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, for instance, Immanuel Kant suggested that man’s sense of self, his idea of “I”, “raises (erhebt) him infinitely above (über) all the other beings living on earth”. Such a being is “altogether different in rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals, which we can dispose of as we please”.¹⁷ For Kant, man enjoys a prerogative “over (über) all the animals”, which he regards not as fellow creatures “but as means and instruments to be used at will”.¹⁸ In writing of humanity’s lofty position, raised “above” and “over” all, Kant employed a well-established spatial trope. Arthur O. Lovej...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Towards an Animal-Centred Literary History
• Part I. Theoretical Underpinnings
• Part II. Medieval Literature
• Part III. Early Modern Literature
• Part IV. Literature of the Eighteenth Century
• Part V. Romantic Literature
• Part VI. Victorian Literature
• Part VII. Modernist Literature
• Part VIII. Contemporary Literature
• Part IX. New Directions
• Correction to: Narratology Beyond the Human: Self-Narratives and Inter-Species Identities
• Back Matter