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SoSe 20: Animals on Screen

Brett Mills

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ONLINE COURSE ----- This seminar asks the question: what happens to the study of television, film and other forms of mass media if the representation of animals is taken into account? Throughout this seminar you will discover, critique, engage with, and apply multiple frameworks useful for thinking about the functions animals fulfil within media. In doing so, you will critique the hitherto anthropocentric nature of the vast majority of academic thinking, and examine why thinking beyond the human matters. Key analytical frameworks that will be explored will include human-animal studies, critical animal studies, posthumanism and the environmental humanities. Given the seminar’s focus on media forms, it will explore the audio-visual nature of animal representation, as well as the relationships between animals and media contexts such as narrative and genre. ---------- Key authors include Carol J. Adams, John Berger, Jonathan Burt, Jacques Derrida, Erica Fudge, Donna Haraway, and Akira Mizuta Lippit. The seminar will draw on a wide range of audio-visual media, including Bear 71 (Mendes and Allion 2017), Carnage (BBC3 2017), Electrocuting an Elephant (Porter or Smith 1903), Lassie (CBS/Syndication 1954-73), Me at the Zoo (YouTube 2005), Planet of the Apes (Schaffner 1968) and pet videos on YouTube. Via this material the seminar will examine the contribution analytical approaches from the humanities can make to contemporary debates about human-animal relations, animal rights/justice/advocacy, animal labour, and the consequences of the normalisation of anthropocentrism. close