The Killing (Off) of Animals in Some Southern African Fiction, or "Why Does Every Animal Story Have to be Sad?"
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20156013 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Wendy A Woodward (0000-0002-7935-739X, corresponding author), Wendy Woodward (0000-0002-9886-1161) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 293-313 |
| Publication date | 2007-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Literary Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0256-4718 • E-ISSN: 1753-5387 |
| Publisher | Unisa Press (PUBLISHER • ZA) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02564710701568139 |
| OpenAlex | W1976548161 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 9 |
The paper begins with cameos of my personal experience of killing animals and a discussion of the media debate in January 2007 about the ritual slaughtering of a "ceremonial bull" by Tony Yengeni. It then investigates representations of non-human animal deaths in some recent southern African fiction in relation to the thinking of Jacques Derrida, Martha Nussbaum, J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, as well as Buddhist ethics and utilitarianism. All the fictional animals are sacrificed to human ideas of "the animal" even though some of the deaths could be classified as euthanasia: the dogs in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace [1999]2000; Sharisha, the whale, in Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller (2005); Piet, the baboon, in Justin Cartwright's White Lightning (2002); and Mangy-Dog in Luis Bernardo Honwana's short story "We Killed Mangy-Dog" ([1969]1977). Ethics relating to animal deaths recur in these fictions: the animals' putative awareness of impending death, the denial of embodied dignity in contrast to the possibilities of human violence and sadism. The animals killed also lose the potential for a flourishing life, even if their suffering has been brought to a close. Some of the writers deploy the sympathetic imagination in their representations of the particular condemned subjects, so that the reader may enter the experience of the othered animal; all portray how the animals are situated, tragically, within a carnophallo-gocentric order which rarely acknowledges their subjectivities or individualises their deaths
Aesthetics · Animal ethics · Animal rights · Anthropocentrism · Art · Criminology · Cruelty · Denial · Dignity · Environmental ethics · Flourishing · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Sacrifice · Sociology · Theology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · South African History and Culture
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,22 |
| Citation span | 2003 - 2014 (12) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |