Meeting the animal in poetry: how Elizabeth Costello's approach in J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals creates a social space of being with the animal.

Abstract

Elizabeth Costello, the main protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, advocates an approach to the question of the animal that involves the poetic or empathic imagination, rather than a philosophical approach, which she argues is anthropocentric. It seems as if she is losing the argument. I fortify her criticism of the philosophers by illustrating the hierarchical, hegemonic framework that their arguments and terminology keep in place. I defend Costello’s approach by reading her lack of success as a resistance of her environment, rather than as a fault in Costello’s poetic approach, and finally defend the productivity of that approach by illustrating its unique opportunity to provide for a social space of 'being with' where the moral act can take place.