Sheffield Animals Research Colloquium (ShARC) and the School of English Research Seminar present
David Herman (Literature, Durham University)
Storytelling beyond the Human: Modelling Animal Experiences in Narrative Worlds
Wednesday, 6th May, 4.30-5.30pm
Richard Roberts Building, A87

This presentation argues that previous research in narratology and stylistics has not investigated fully enough questions raised by the use of methods of thought presentation to model the experiential worlds of nonhuman animals. Outlining an expanded and diversified conception of the mind-narrative nexus, I link the narrative projection of nonhuman subjectivity with Uexküll’s idea of the Umwelt, an animal’s lived or phenomenal world. In this way, I suggest how stories can be used to explore potential heterogeneities–but also potential areas of commonality–in the structure of experience across the species boundary. Focusing on writers ranging from Jack London, Daphne du Maurier, and William Horwood to J. A. Baker and Esther Woolfson, I examine a variety of methods for presenting animals’ experiences, and also consider issues arising from the way those methods straddle the fiction/nonfiction divide.
David Herman, Professor of the Engaged Humanities at Durham University, is currently working to bring ideas from narrative studies into dialogue with scholarship on animals and human-animal relationships.