Agency can be approached from the human case (anthropogenically) or coming from life in general, with organisms like bacteria in mind (biogenically). Each perspective is biased: the former approach tends to set the bar for agency very high, while the latter invites very liberal attributions of agency. Such a polarisation is epistemically flawed. As a rectification, this paper calls for a hermeneutical back-and-forth between opposite approaches to agency – reducing excessive restrictiveness or permissiveness and combining the unique explanatory strengths of (...) both approaches. Five common research tasks are used to illustrate the merits of such flexibility and the risks of rigidly clinging to any single approach. After questioning the dichotomy between the two approaches to agency, the findings are summed up. (shrink)

This essay explores the application of zoomorphism and anthropomorphism in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. The novel, rather than being a mere shipwreck-narrative or a miraculous tale with religious overtones, is also a story about the complicated and perhaps inevitably divided relationship between humans and animals. This essay introduces the fields of ecocriticism and animal studies and defines anthropomorphism and zoomorphism in the context of literary criticism. The essay goes on to discuss the layers of meaning behind the names (...) and naming of the two main characters using Burke’s rhetoric of identification, analyses the anthropomorphism and religiosity in the novel’s two stories, and analyses the two accepted readings of the novel from a zoomorphic perspective. The essay looks at the human-animal divide and its problems in literature, going into Derrida’s animal philosophy to provide a counterpoint to a view derived from Cartesian dualism. In a straight reading of the novel, the first story is regarded as metaphoric while the second story is regarded as literal. There is an alternative reading where it is left to the reader to decide which story is true, but this essay argues that this reading negates a metaphoric interpretation of either story and therefore dismisses the straight reading. Instead, this essay proposes a third, zoomorphic reading, fully compatible with the straight reading, where anthropomorphism is employed to externalize human actions onto animals, but where zoomorphism is employed to project animals onto humans in order to externalize their cannibalism. In the zoomorphic reading, both stories are interpreted as vehicles of projection while avoiding the logical pitfall of the alternative reading. (shrink)