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Carrie Rohman, assistant professor of English, has published a new book focusing on the relationship between the human and the animal in British modernism.
Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal was released Oct. 17 by Columbia University Press. It investigates animality and humanism in the works of early 20th century authors such as Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, and Djuna Barnes.
“The book examines the period in British literature that came a few decades after Darwin’s work was published,” says Rohman. “In that period, we saw a particularly acute crisis of human identity as it relates to the ‘specter’ of the animal. There is a fascinating range of responses in literary and cultural work during modernism that attempt to reckon with our connection to the animal and with the fact that our previously held concepts of human difference or separation from animals are profoundly challenged in this period.”
Rohman hopes the book will provide readers with a more complex and sophisticated look at the relationship between human and animal, as well as a better understanding of the philosophical and ethical stakes inherent in that relationship.
“Our relationship to the non-human world, in terms of ecology and environmental questions, continues to be one of the most pressing ethical questions we face as human beings at this moment in history,” she says. “Animals in particular present an especially complex and demanding subject because they are sentient, they experience suffering, and because recent work in areas like neuroscience continues to reveal just how complex and advanced animal consciousness and ‘mind’ really are.”
The concepts in Rohman’s book are also coming across in the classroom. This semester, she is teaching a modern British literature course which includes the theme of human identity being caught between the specter of the animal and the specter of the machine. She also hopes to teach a VAST (Values and Science/Technology) course focusing on the question of the animal in contemporary literature, culture, and ethics.