The Wounded Animal

by Mulhall, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9780691137377
• ISBN10: 0691137374
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-12-08
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 asThe Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novelElizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number of influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell. InThe Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations between reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance.

Author Biography

Stephen Mulhall is fellow and tutor in philosophy at New College, University of Oxford. His books include On Film, The Conversation of Humanity, and Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton)

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. ix
Introduction: The Ancient Quarrel	p. 1
The Lives of Animals	p. 19
Elizabeth Costello's Lecture: Stories, Thought-Experiments, and Literal-Mindedness	p. 21
Elizabeth Costello's Lecture: Three Philosophers and a Number of Apes	p. 36
Food for Thought: Two Symposia	p. 58
Food for Thought: A Third Symposium	p. 69
Food for Thought: An Uninvited Guest?	p. 95
Elizabeth Costello's Seminar: Two Poets and a Novelist	p. 110
Elizabeth Costello's Seminar: Primatology and Animal Training, Philosophy and Literary Theory	p. 122
Elizabeth Costello	p. 137
Realism, Modernism, and the Novel	p. 139
Costello's Realist Modernism, and Coetzee's	p. 162
The Body in Africa	p. 184
Evil as Obscenity	p. 203
Two Embodiments of the Kafkaesque	p. 214
Conclusion: Three Postscripts	p. 231
Bibliography	p. 253
Index	p. 257
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.