Animals in literature: metaphor, ethics, ecology

The essay introduces the topic of the study of the animal in literature with a special focus on Slovak poetry. After briefly outlining the field in which research of literature meets research of nature, animals, plants, and the environment of human and non-human animals, it discusses a few examples from Slovak literature. Animal studies, posthumanism, and other fields of critical research which abolish the boundary between culture and nature, redefine the identity of the human element and see it as part of a network in which agency is a feature shared by various entities. Removing the human from the top of the hierarchy calls for a revision of such notions as consciousness or free will and a more intense focus on the “non-human” actors – i.e. agential entities which share with the human some of their features, but differ in others. The essay provides an overview of the types of literary texts which have inspired interdisciplinary research of literature and nature in the past few decades (environmental and ecoliterate texts, cli-fi), outlines the research field and its aims and provides a brief overview of some of the relevant theoretical approaches and recent publications.