| This dissertation asks what it takes to see animals as having grievable lives, arguing that certain forms of literature can create the conditions for grievability, transforming what it means to mourn animal lives in the process. Focusing on J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and The Lives of Animals, Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, and Angela Rawlings's Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, I examine material and philosophical crises related to animal deaths across the globe. Cumulatively, animal crises such as factory farming, scientific experimentation on animals, and species extinction reveal the urgency and relevancy of animal death to a moment in history when concerns about the wisdom of current human practices toward the environment are at the center of many political, social and academic debates. I deploy the concept of "species necropolitics" as a way to chart the political and cultural systems that regulate animal deaths, suggesting that a focus on necropolitics and death rather than biopolitics and life calls into question the assumptions that underlie human authority over animal death.;Different kinds of literary representations produce different ways of imagining relationships between humans and animals. While some of these representations are based on human affects such as sympathy or mourning, others diverge from affect altogether, disrupting a human-centric focus on how literature produces feeling in its individual human readers, instead proposing forms of connection based on collectivity, ethics, unstable knowledge, or unsettlement. This revisioning of form results in a reconstitution of what humans can think and feel about animal endings in this moment of environmental and ethical crisis. By examining these alternative forms, this dissertation charts a movement from texts that become "stuck" in melancholia (as thwarted mourning) to texts that that attempt to produce grievability in ethical and effective ways. While for Coetzee and Martel, mourning is explicitly impossible and there is a palpable sense of despair or confusion over how to come to terms with animal death, Smith and Rawlings move beyond an ethics that relies on sympathy or compassion for the other, insisting instead upon a collective ethics of care for the planet as a whole. |
