MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

J. M. Coetzee’s academic novella The Lives of Animals is at once illuminating and uncomfortable in the ways in which the text explores the treatment of nonhuman animals through a controversial analogy between the Holocaust and slaughterhouses. Liberal Arts colleges, and their English departments more specifically, typically have courses and faculty who are passionate about students’ developing their whole being into well-rounded selves who will be capable of tackling contemporary social issues, but few English departments offer courses on how humans interact with nonhuman animals. I propose that Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals be used as an anchor text to create a course in which students will question their assumptions of everything they know and everything that they do not know about how their lives influence and are influenced by the lives of animals. One major problem that students will encounter in the course involves questions on the moral issues of humans committing crimes against other humans and also against nonhuman animals. Whose lives are valuable? How do laws and policies affect our assumptions on the value of lives? What are the ways in which humans use animals and for what purposes? Who punishes whom and for what reasons? Can humans think their way into the minds of nonhuman animals? How are human lives different from the lives of other animals? Thus, the purpose of the exploration is two-fold: first, to help students develop an awareness of issues involving the lives of both human and nonhuman animals so that they can communicate about those issues in fruitful manners; and, second, to provide an academic space for experimental and experiential learning that culminate in an independent activist project in which the students will demonstrate what they can do to create change for the future by exploring unresolved questions from the course.