In Animals and Other People, Heather Keenleyside argues for the central role of literary modes of knowledge in apprehending animal life. Keenleyside focuses on writers who populate their poetry, novels, and children's stories with conspicuously figurative animals, experiment with conventional genres like the beast fable, and write the "lives" of mice as well as men. From such writers—including James Thomson, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and others—she recovers a key insight about the representation of living beings: when we think and write about animals, we are never in the territory of strictly literal description, relying solely on the evidence of our senses. Indeed, any description of animals involves personification of a sort, if we understand personification not as a rhetorical ornament but as a fundamental part of our descriptive and conceptual repertoire, essential for distinguishing living beings from things. Throughout the book, animals are characterized by a distinctive mode of agency and generality; they are at once moving and being moved, at once individual beings and generic or species figures (every cat is also "The Cat"). Animals thus become figures with which to think about key philosophical questions about the nature of human agency and of social and political community. They also come into view as potential participants in that community, as one sort of "people" among others. Demonstrating the centrality of animals to an eighteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition, Animals and Other People also argues for the importance of this tradition to current discussions of what life is and how we might live together.
Animals and Other People" examines how eighteenth-century writers turn to animals to rethink the mechanisms by which social and political community is shaped, and to consider who or what this community includes. More specifically, it considers why and how writers of poetry (James Thomson), narrative fiction (Daniel Defoe and Laurence Sterne), and children's literature (Anna Letitia Barbauld, Sarah Trimmer, and Mary Wollstonecraft) use literary devices and genres---personification, life narratives, and fable---that foreground the relationship between humans and other species. Prevailing accounts of the eighteenth century depict an age of liberal revolutions that refined the logic of contract and secured its sovereign subject. This study traces a counter-tradition of political and ethical thought around the uncertain status of humans, animals, and persons. In doing so, it charts an important prehistory to recent work by J. M. Coetzee, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben, who all call for a critical reconsideration of the human-animal relationship. "Animals and Other People" suggests that new readings of various moments in Enlightenment thought can help us both to develop and to evaluate the kind of non-anthropocentric ethics that many critiques of the Enlightenment seek.
In Animals and Other People, Heather Keenleyside argues for the central role of literary modes of knowledge in apprehending animal life. Keenleyside focuses on writers who populate their poetry, novels, and children's stories with conspicuously figurative animals, experiment with conventional genres like the beast fable, and write the "lives" of mice as well as men. From such writers—including James Thomson, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and others—she recovers a key insight about the representation of living beings: when we think and write about animals, we are never in the territory of strictly literal description, relying solely on the evidence of our senses. Indeed, any description of animals involves personification of a sort, if we understand personification not as a rhetorical ornament but as a fundamental part of our descriptive and conceptual repertoire, essential for distinguishing living beings from things. Throughout the book, animals are characterized by a distinctive mode of agency and generality; they are at once moving and being moved, at once individual beings and generic or species figures (every cat is also "The Cat"). Animals thus become figures with which to think about key philosophical questions about the nature of human agency and of social and political community. They also come into view as potential participants in that community, as one sort of "people" among others. Demonstrating the centrality of animals to an eighteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition, Animals and Other People also argues for the importance of this tradition to current discussions of what life is and how we might live together.
Since the mid-twentieth century, sustained contact between Inuit and newcomers has led to profound changes in education in the Eastern Arctic, including the experience of colonization and progress toward the re-establishment of traditional education in schools. Heather McGregor assesses developments in the history of education in four periods � the traditional, the colonial (1945-70), the territorial (1971-81), and the local (1982-99). She concludes that education is most successful when Inuit involvement and local control support a system reflecting Inuit culture and visions.
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