Humans are a species of animal, and animals have long been used to represent human qualities and dilemmas. In Western narrative, these representations have taken many complex forms, all the way to wildly imaginative distortions of the human in the animals, and the animal in the human. We shall look first at traditional representations (Homer's similes, Aesop's and La Fontaine's fables) and some modern revisions (Bresson's film AU HASARD BALTHAZAR, Art Spiegelman's MAUS), then at obsessional relations of men to animals (Kleist's MICHAEL KOHLHAAS, Flaubert's A SIMPLE HEART, Cormac McCarthy's novel THE CROSSING), and conclude with the powerful renderings of animals--scarcely human, all-too-human--in Kafka's short stories. The seminar is an introduction to the close study of comparative literature across different periods, styles, and cultural contexts, with a view toward the philosophical issues raised by literature. |