Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory revolutionized how humans relate to animals. Alongside the traditional man-versus-beast mentality, society has made room for a more familial view of our fellow earth dwellers.
This is a shift that Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and Nancy C. Hoefs Professor of English Mario Ortiz-Robles has observed in his study of 19th-century British literature. In fact, Victorians’ love of books like Black Beauty and their fascination with the animal kingdom inspired his own evolution in research interests. Darwin’s writings especially catalyzed Ortiz-Robles’s foray into a growing field: animal studies.
“Animal studies is a way of thinking about the cultural history of human-animal relations,” explains Ortiz-Robles. People know a lot about animals through hard sciences like zoology and biology. But this emerging discipline offers a humanities-based look at how humans relate to the natural world and its many other occupants. “Animal studies tries to understand that critically,” says Ortiz-Robles, “[by] looking at animal rights not only in terms of how we treat animals but also sometimes in the way in which we may consider animals as moral subjects and moral beings.”
You might call it the animalities. In 2016, Ortiz-Robles wrote Literature and Animal Studies, a history of common creatures such as dogs, cats, and horses appearing and often starring in novels and other texts. As a senior fellow of the Institute for Research in the Humanities, he’s currently focused on 19th-century zoos and circuses and how such institutions still color humanity’s outlook on animal captivity and extinction.
Of course, as an English professor, Ortiz-Robles also lists a fair share of animal-related readings in his syllabi. From 2018-2022, he served as a Mellon-Morgridge professor for the College of Letters & Science’s Constellations program, an opportunity that allowed him to develop an interdisciplinary humanities class in line with his — and many students’ — interests. Dive into a few of his reading requirements for courses like English 376: Literature and Animal Studies.
My assigned texts and media include:
- Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
- The Lives of Animals by J. M. Coetzee
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- “A Report to an Academy” by Franz Kafka
- The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells
- The Animal That Therefore I Am by Jacques Derrida
- The Open: Man and Animal by Giorgio Agamben
- The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination by Harriet Ritvo
- Fantastic Mr. Fox directed by Wes Anderson
One of the most popular novels in the 19th century was Black Beauty. Horses were everywhere in the 19th century. It’s narrated from the point of view of the horse, and it was incredibly popular. For many people, that illustrated the need for animal rights and animal welfare laws. … Little by little, all sorts of laws were introduced in England and America that regulated human’s treatment of animals.
[The Platypus and the Mermaid] looks at the history of classification. We have all these systems to classify animals, and we give them Latin names, but all of a sudden, we encounter animals that are really, really hard to classify, like a platypus. These animals create problems for these systems of classification, and systems of classification help us understand the world. But they also lead us to think about how we control nature.
In my spare time, I read:
- John le Carré novels
- Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year by Peter Brooks
I have free time every once in a while. If it’s the summer, I usually like reading spy novels. Right now, I’m reading two books by Peter Brooks, who is a famous literary critic. One is on Flaubert, who was a French novelist in the 19th century. It chronicles one year in his life in 1870, which is when the Prussians defeated France and invaded Paris.
The book I’ve been meaning to get around to is:
- Henry James Goes to Paris by Peter Brooks
[It’s] a companion piece [to Flaubert] that I haven’t started yet. It’s about one year in the life of another novelist, this time Henry James, who was an American living in Paris in 1870.
The author I always come back to is:
[Charles] Dickens. His novels are all so good. If I had to choose one, I would say Bleak House. I teach Dickens. I always go back to Dickens. Even in the book that I’m working on now, there’s a chapter on Dickens.
The book I think everyone should read is:
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
I remember my mother gave me that book when I was a teenager, and I said, “Really?” I started reading it, and it really sort of changed me. Part of the reason why I teach literature now has to do a little bit with that experience that I had back then. It’s an incredible novel that I’ve read many times. There’s actually going to be a Netflix adaptation of it coming soon, so stay tuned.
