Throughout his work, Sebald engages intensively with ecological issues which this essay examines, using the theories of Ecocriticism and Cultural and Literary Animal Studies. Two aspects of Sebald’s concept of ‘nature’ are particularly important. First, the notion of ‘nature’ in his writings proves inherently contradictory: nature is at both a self-destructive force and a precious good, subject to human destruction. Therefore, humans appear sometimes as helpless victims of the forces of nature, and sometimes as ruthless destroyers of nature. Second, in Sebald’s concept of ‘nature’ , culture and nature do not constitute opposites. Instead, man is not seen as a counterpart of nature, but as an integral part of it, as a product of a nature through which it accomplishes its self-destruction. The destruction of nature is accordingly understood as an interplay of different actors. Non-human nature (plants and animals as well as landscapes) are perceived as actors in a system in which each element contributes to the self-destruction of earth, connecting man, animals and natural world by their shared suffering.

J. M. Coetzee is widely recognised as one of the most important writers working in English. As a South African (now Australian) novelist composing his best-known works in the latter third of the twentieth century, Coetzee has understandably often been read through the lenses of post-colonial theory and post-war ethics. Yet his reception is entering a new phase bolstered by thousands of pages of new and unpublished empirical evidence housed at the J. M. Coetzee archive at The Harry Ransom Center (University of Austin, Texas). This material provokes a re-reading of Coetzee’s project even as it uncovers keys to his process of formal experimentation and compositional evolution up to and including Disgrace (1999). Following Coetzee’s false starts, his confrontation of narrative impasses, and his shifting deployment of source materials, J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel provides a new series of detailed snapshots of one of the world’s most celebrated authors.

This chapter argues that anthropological studies of human relationships with animals can draw our attention towards – rather than away from – the importance of representation within human ethical lives. The chapter posits that the anthropological ethical turn and the animal turn are each orientated in different ways to the concept of ‘representation’. This means the two traditions speak at cross-purposes to one another, visible particularly in their distinctive innovations in relation to ‘personhood’. From the perspective of the ethical turn, the personhood (or agency) attributed to animals by multispecies ethnographers appears ethically thin. From the perspective of the animal turn, the ethicists’ focus on varied human-held forms of reflection risks repeating dualistic distinctions and portraying animals only as they appear within human accounts. Yet the chapter shows that these two emerging traditions can benefit from one another, in attending to ‘more-than-representational’ (not non-representational) aspects of ethics. These include (1) the material/embodied form of ethical representations, (2) the fact that ethical life often seems inherently hard to represent, and (3) varied ethical attitudes towards representation (such as the ‘honesty’ sometimes associated with lack of speech) that can be seen as and when people interact with their animals.

The first written description of the muskox was published in 1744 by Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, a French Jesuit and historian, within a description of ‘New France’ (the French colony of North America) in his multi-volume Journal d’un voyage. He describes an animal encountered in the area of Hudson Bay with long, beautiful hair and a musky smell in rutting season – and he gave it the name boeuf musqué.1 Musk was originally a label for the odour from the gland of a male musk deer, a native of Asia, which was used in perfumes, but animals with similar type odours were given musk names, like the muskrat and musk shrew. Charlevoix’s original descriptor for the animal stuck: it became muskox in English, moskusokse in Norwegian, myskoxe in Swedish, Moschusochse in German, and stayed boeuf musqué in French.

Daniel Defoe wrote about animals to think about the world. This essay describes not only the ways that Defoe wrote about animals, but the different ways in which eighteenth-century England understood animals in relation to human culture.

The second chapter explores the music behind the poetry of Homer, looking at the melodic part of poetry – that is, the part that makes poetry song – in the Iliad, Odyssey, and two Homeric Hymns. It suggests that the early conceptualization of music borrows from the fields of artisanal objects and animal sounds, using these two different kinds of materiality to enact the presence of melody avant la lettre. These modes of conceptualization both place song within the material world, suggesting a presence that can shift and change, but that it will persist by way of such change.

Surrealism’s disdain for Western civilization has increasingly come to encompass its mistreatment of animals and the environment. The surrealist critique of the exploitation and domination of other species and the planet frequently recognizes the way in which these are bound up with repression along the lines of both gender and epistemology. This chapter examines how two novels by women surrealists from different generations thematize the nexus of environmental destruction, animal exploitation, and the triumphal march of scientistic rationalism. The British-born, naturalized Mexican artist and writer Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974) and the American artist and writer Rikki Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland (1995) are caustic, humorous, and wildly adventurous interrogations of ecological catastrophes and conjurations of new modes of being that may be able to counteract them. This chapter reads The Hearing Trumpet and Phosphor in Dreamland in relation to a broader surrealist critique of environmental destruction and exploitation, and as at one and the same time eulogies of extinction and tributes to the magical potential of transformation.

I introduce a distinction between “slow and relatively harmonious” and “fast and radical” as far as the integration of AI into human life is concerned. Regarding the “slow and relatively harmonious” scenario, I explore a set of questions about how it would make sense for humans to acknowledge some such status in machines. But we must also ask whether self-conscious artificial intelligences would be morally equivalent to humans. I do so by asking what an increase in moral status for machines means for the political domain. Chapter 3 explored why AI would affect the democratic process in the near future. Here our concern is with a scenario further along. One question is whether there is a cognitive capacity beyond intelligence and self-consciousness that is needed for involvement in the political domain. Paying attention to what is appropriate to say about animals in that regard is useful. As far as the “fast and radical” scenario is concerned, I first explore why philosophically we are so dramatically unprepared to deal with an intelligence explosion, with a focus on what kind of moral status superintelligences might acknowledge in us. Finally, I attend to Tegmark’s discussion of political scenarios that could arise after an intelligence explosion and add a public-reason scenario that could offer a vision for a political context shared between humans and superintelligences.

Though Cicero offers his most explicit, detailed critiques of Epicureanism in De Finibus and De Natura Deorum, his anti-Epicureanism consistently works itself into a wide swath of his theoretical writings over the last 13 years of his life. Therein Cicero consistently uses a rhetorical strategy whereby he avoids naming the Epicureans outright. Instead he employs a series of shorthand descriptions to attack the Epicureans for what he understands to be their basic tenets. In employing this tactic Cicero both slights the Epicureans by leaving them unnamed and reduces their philosophy to a set of behaviors that he thinks best encapsulate their beliefs. They fail by believing the soul to be mortal, by prioritizing an animal-like desire for pleasure over ratio and oratio, and by using quasi-commercial calculations to make ethical decisions. In each of these ways they fail most of all in Cicero’s eyes by representing a threat to the social fabric of the republic.

This chapter introduces the main theorists associated with ecological hermeneutics, their objectives and strategies. It demonstrates how an ecological approach can be applied using a specific story from the book of Judges as a case study.

The interdisciplinary field of animal studies owes much to Darwin’s work, particularly in the Descent of Man, where he claims that mental and emotional capacities ranging from an ability to reason to an aesthetic sense exist in other animals besides humans. This chapter examines the significance of Darwin’s work for animal ethics, the science of animal behavior, theories of companion species, and the age of mass extinction. Activists, scientists, humanists, and environmentalists continue to find new uses for Darwin’s work as they pursue greater knowledge about the animal kingdom and more just ecological communities.

This chapter surveys the broader social contexts for dissection, in four sections: public performance, animals, religion, and popular conceptions of anatomy. The first section offers the context for public displays of dissection, namely competing types of performance, including sophistic lectures, legal proceedings, and the general spectacle of the streets. The second focuses on animals and the various circumstances outside scientific dissection in which bodies were cut into and opened, with specific attention on butchery, veterinary practice, pharmacology, magic, and staged animal shows in the arena. The third turns to religious contexts, encompassing the practices of animal sacrifice and divination from entrails, as well as the Italic votive tradition, which included artistic representations of various internal organs, and the Egyptian practice of embalmment. Finally, there is a sketch of popular experience with and conceptions of bodily rupture and anatomy, ranging from postmortem punishments, public executions and gladiatorial displays in the arena, and military violence to literary descriptions of gore, artistic depictions of bodies, and intellectual engagement with anatomy.

This chapter considers the material and practical requirements of dissection, relying both on Galen’s advice on the subject and on historical and archaeological evidence. After an exploration of the sensory experience of participating in dissections and vivisections, the first section handles anatomical subjects themselves, first monkeys (which Galen considers to be the ideal subjects) then other animals; in each case, the chapter addresses their selection and the probable ways in which dissectors acquired them, covering livestock markets, butchers, trade in exotic animals, and in particular the flow of animals into and out of the arena. It then offers a new and comprehensive consideration of human dissection in antiquity, with a focus on its debated practice in the Roman period. The second half of the chapter considers other requirements for dissection. First of these are the tools, which are presented in terms of selection and acquisition. Next follows a consideration of the books intended to support dissection and their comparative availability. The chapter ends with a look at the people a dissector may have relied on, as assistants in the procedures or as lectors and scribes.