The Lives of Animals (Magill’s Literary Annual 2000)
At a glance:
- Author: J. M. Coetzee
- First Published: 1999
- Type of Work: Novella, literary criticism, and philosophy
- Principal Characters: Elizabeth Costello, John Bernard, Norma, Abraham Stern, Thomas O’Hearne, Marjorie Garber, Peter Sanger, Wendy Doniger, Barbara Smuts
- Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy
- Subjects: Teaching or teachers, Mothers, Parents and children, Philosophy or philosophers, College life, Cruelty, Holocaust, Jewish, Animals, Australia or Australians, Vegetarianism, Reason or reasoning
J. M. (John Maxwell) Coetzee, internationally distinguished South African novelist and literary critic and professor of English at the University of Cape Town, was the invited speaker to give the 1997-1998 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University. His two presentations, “The Philosophers and the Animals” and “The Poets and the Animals,” here given in amended versions, speak powerfully to the need for a change in consciousness in human attitudes and practices regarding animals. Rather than make his arguments in lecture form, Coetzee wrote a metafictional novella, a story about a...
[The entire page is 2078 words long]
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