Letting the Animal Speak: Kafka, Coetzee, and Agamben

This thesis articulates the resonances between German-language writer, Franz Kafka, and South African novelist, J. M. Coetzee's lifelong engagement with nonhuman animals and how their fiction raises ethical questions concerning human-animal relations through their imaginative and, at times, outre literary representations of animals. From Kafka's singing mice, loquacious apes and jackals, moles, and anthropomorphized insects, to Coetzee's post-apartheid world of emaciated, feral dogs, both writers routinely draw on the lexical field of the animal to reflect critically on ethics and the human condition. While literary scholarship has focused intently on ways in which Kafka's stylistics have informed Coetzee's novels, scant research has seriously considered how Kafka's astounding range of nonhuman animal life has shaped the latter's employment of nonhuman animal figures. Not only a frequenter of the Berlin zoo and aquarium, Kafka casts his reputation as a devout exponent of vegetarianism, and his relationship with the animal world, both real and imaginary, cannot be understated when grappling with his unquestionable influence on Coetzee's thinking. Against this backdrop, this thesis draws on critical animal studies within the philosophical contexts of Giorgio Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal (2004), in which he outlines the `anthropological machine,' a concept that interrogates the ethical fallout resulting from the exclusion of animals from political consideration. Engaging this concept in a nuanced fashion, Coetzee's pro-animal rights manifesto, The Lives of Animals (1999), doubts the persuasive capabilities of traditional philosophical principles in deconstructing anthropocentrism, instead elaborating an ethics derived from a `poetry of imagination' (i.e. fiction), specifically a kind of writing, carefully eschewing sentimentality, that engages nonhuman otherness by identifying with the lived experience and perspective of animals. Contesting anthropocentric aesthetics in favor of a more inclusive, biocentric model, literary representation of animals in the contexts of both writers radically open up fresh approaches for rethinking species difference and, crucially, how we value otherness.