Through the Looking Glass: Figuring the Animal

Wendy Woodward and Erika Lemma (2014, 1) pertinently noted almost a decade ago that “the terms Animal Studies (AS) and Human-Animal Studies (HAS) have been used almost interchangeably in this fairly recent, burgeoning field”; however, the literary trajectory is a much longer one. For South Africans it was possibly Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals (1999)—soon incorporated into his Elizabeth Costello (2003)—that drew attention at the turn of the millennium to the symbiosis of humans and animals, thus arguably re-igniting the literary legacy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1907), Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s even earlier epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855). In 2009, perhaps transposing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famed rationalist adage, “Je pense donc je suis” (I think, therefore I am), Jacques Derrida intrigued with The Animal That Therefore I Am, compacting the roots of the eco-phenomenological tree. Soon, the blooming tree became a home for storytellers, poets, and philosophers, providing literary critics, such as those featured in this issue, with an ontopoietic imaginary—that is, a heightened awareness of the oneness of the animal kingdom on Planet Earth.