Animal, Vegetable, Mineral
Course Description
Today, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is most famous for having developed binomial nomenclature, the system we still use for naming living organisms. What many people do not know is that Linnaeus’s taxonomic method divided the natural world into three kingdoms. There were the two kingdoms of plants and of animals, as we might assume. There was also a third kingdom of minerals—rocks, fossils, and ores. What might have motivated “the father of modern taxonomy” to use the same method of identification to designate both living and non-living things? Why do human beings classify natural things at all? And what questions do these classificatory systems raise—not only for science, but also for the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and politics?
In this course, we explore these questions by looking back to the periods of the Enlightenment and Romanticism—the historical moment in which these modes of knowledge were being established, commercialized, and debated in the public sphere. Throughout, we’ll be interested in how these classificatory practices also helped to define the human itself. How is the category of the human related to both the classification of living things into species—and to the historical constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality? When we say “we,” who is included in that community? Our pets? Our pests? Our dead? Might “we” include mountains—or, in the words of the poet William Wordsworth, “rocks, and stones, and trees”? Readings for the course will include philosophical and scientific texts, novels and poems, as well as select secondary and theoretical texts. In the imaginative literature we read, we’ll find that creative writers were just as capable as scientists and theorists of developing complex approaches to these challenging questions. Our archive of texts will reveal to us a variety of ways that human beings have encountered, defined, used, cared for, and lived with other creatures and entities. In doing so, we’ll find, these texts also offer up ways that human beings have understood—and sometimes misunderstood—themselves.
Required Texts
Tommy Pico, Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017)
J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton University Press, 1999)
Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001)
Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Broadview, 2012)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Norton, 1996)
Assignments
Your main occupation this semester is to find the best ways you can to care for yourself and others. What is the place of intellectual work in that? That’s for you to figure out, and your answer may change day by day or week by week. This class is structured around substantial discussion and reading, but it can also be flexible. Your well-being, whatever constitutes that for you, matters more than this or any class. If you are having any trouble with the class or otherwise, let me know. You don’t need to confide in me, but I will do what I can to help.
1. Participation
For this class to be a lively and productive group conversation, I’d like all voices to be included. I understand that not everyone is comfortable with verbal participation in a classroom setting, especially within the zoom format. If this description feels familiar, please come to my office hours and we’ll talk about how we can incorporate your ideas into the class. You will also be able to make contributions to the ongoing class conversation through our second assignment (click, click), outlined below.
Attendance is part of your participation grade. Attending and being attentive in each class meeting may not always be possible, but I hope you will make an earnest effort. You can miss two classes without excuse or explanation; if you will miss more than two, please talk to me about it.
2. Ongoing: click, click
This is a very simple assignment. We’ll end our zoom discussions ten minutes early each day, and you’ll go to a shared google doc and scribble down what feels like it’s clicking for you after the readings and the discussion. Some days you might write several sentences or a paragraph. Other days, maybe just a couple of keywords or a question. You might make a note about something you liked about a particular essay or a comment you or someone else made in discussion that put things together for you. You might even note a feeling of personal connection.
The point of this assignment is threefold: One, your entries will be a record for you of ideas or revelations or things that have mattered to you over the course of the semester. Two, your entries will be a record for the whole class of emergent ideas and problems that develop over the course of the semester. Three, most practically, the document will be a resource for each week’s segue presentations (see below).
3. Segue: from last time to this time
Twice during the semester (once in the first half and once in the second) you will give a short (no more than five minutes) segue presentation. Your job in these presentations will be to open our class discussion in a way that draws some connection between the present day’s reading and our previous days discussion. Our google doc should be a resource here. In fact, it’s even better if you can synthesize some of what others have said or written in your presentation. You don’t need to be exhaustive in referencing the doc, but you should aim to demonstrate your familiarity with others’ lingering thoughts and comments. The most effective presentations will conclude with some prompt or question that launches our discussion.
4. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Collaborative Glossary
Over the course of the class, we will build a glossary together of important terms and concepts that come up in our reading and discussion. Four times during the semester (one for each unit except the last) you will submit a glossary entry that illuminates a term related to the course themes. You’ll submit your entries first to me through canvas. (Deadlines for these submissions are noted below in our schedule.) I’ll then provide you with some feedback. You’ll have one week from the day you receive your feedback to post your entry to our wordpress site (address forthcoming).
Terms can be drawn directly from our readings, or you can offer terms that might encompass or define a larger concept or theme from the class, or you can offer a laterally-related but important term for us to consider. You’re welcome to choose a term that is more personal or idiosyncratic, too, as long as it connects to what we are doing together in class. If you’d like to generate your term collaboratively, I’m happy to meet with you.
Glossary entries can and probably will range in both style and medium. Since you’ll produce four of these over the course of the semester, I encourage you to experiment with a variety of modes of expression. You might choose to supplement one of your entries with images, videos, sound, or other media that you’ve created. Some entries might forgo writing altogether. In all cases, your entries should note the text or texts from our syllabus that your term is drawn from or inspired by. Terms can be duplicated – we will have different understandings – but the entries should be unique.
In the next week or so, I will distribute a handout that contains all of the details and requirements for the assignment. I will be grading your glossary entries wholistically, which is to say that you need not meet every requirement in every glossary entry. For example, at least one glossary entry will need to involve some amount of outside research, but they need not all do so. The handout will include a list of skills and components that you should demonstrate over the course of your four glossary entries. Everyone who meets these basic requirements and submits all four glossary entries on time will receive at minimum a B for the assignment.
Schedule of Readings
Introduction: Where do you know from?
Week 1
Key words and themes; Anna Letitia Barbauld, “The Caterpillar” (1771)
Placing ourselves
Unit 1: Natural Taxonomy and the Human
Week 2
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “Truth-to-Nature,” in Objectivity (2010); Mary Louise Pratt, “Science, Planetary Consciousness, Interiors,” in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992, 2008)
William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” (1995)
Week 3
Alexander Pope, selections from An Essay on Man (1733-34)
Week 4
Tommy Pico, Nature Poem (2017)
Melissa K. Nelson, “Getting Dirty: The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures”
Unit 2: Animal
Week 5
Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” in The Philosophical Review (1974); optional: Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” in Feminist Studies (1988)
Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto (2003)
glossary entry #1 due on Canvas
Week 6
Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto cont’d; Vicki Hearne, “A Taxonomy of Knowing: Animals Captive, Free-Ranging, and at Liberty” (1995)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Brobdignnag” (1726)
Week 8
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms” (1726)
Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy” (1917)
Week 9
J.M Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (1999): introduction, pp. 15-45, and pp. 73-91
The Lives of Animals, cont’d: pp. 47-69 and pp. 93-120
Unit 3: Vegetable
Week 10
Erasmus Darwin, selections from The Botanic Garden (1791)
Dorothy Wordsworth, selections from The Grasmere Journals (1800-1803); William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1804, 1815); John Keats, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818)
glossary entry #2 due on Canvas
Week 11
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, selected prose and poetry
Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book): (1999)
Week 12
My Garden (Book):, cont’d
Unit 4: Mineral
Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head (1803-1806, 1807)
Week 13
glossary entry #3 due on Canvas
The History of Mary Prince (1831)
Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena, “Pluriverse: Proposals for a World of Many Worlds” (2018); Marisol de la Cadena, “Story 5. Chamanismo Andino in the Third Millennium: Multiculturalism Meets Earth-Beings,” in Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015)
Week 14
William Wordsworth, selections from Lyrical Ballads (1800); Dorothy Wordsworth, “Floating Island” (late 1820’s); Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni” (1816)
Unit 5: Monster
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); optional: selections from Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, eds. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt (2017)
glossary entry #4 due on Canvas
Week 15
Frankenstein, cont’d
final reflections and wrap-up