Deconstructing Anthropocentrism in Animal Literature

This essay examines a short story and two novels in animal literature: ‘The Metamorphosis’ (1915) by Franz Kafka, Eva (1988) by Peter Dickinson, and The Lives of Animals (1999) by J. M. Coetzee. While ‘The Metamorphosis’ centres on the transformation of a man into an insect, the two novels feature central characters, Eva’s Eva and The Lives of Animals’s Costello, whose purposes are to remove the anthropocentric assumption that there is a dividing line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. As human history has witnessed unnecessary violence exerted on non-human animals, and as ecocritics and writers attempt to adopt animals’ perspectives and give them agency, this essay argues that, in deconstructing anthropocentrism, the three texts bridge the human-animal gap. They remind humans of their animality, thus stressing our inherent interconnectedness with non-human animals. This essay particularly uses notions of anthropomorphism, zoomorphism and sympathetic imagination as a platform for discussing the authors’ attempts in promoting the power of human imagination that gives animals voices and subjectivity, raises questions about animal advocacy, and that helps save them from human violence. This essay aims to conclude that the three texts invite the reader to engage in sympathetic imagination, offering new ways out of anthropocentric thoughts