H. G. Wells and Interspecies (Re)Encounters: Challenging the Anthropocentric Gaze of Literary Education

• In Event: 61.044 - Big Little Lies: Contradictions, Distortions, and Fictions in Human-Animal Education

Abstract

The literary educational project in Western schools has historically supported two larger ideological projects: humanism and imperial colonialism. Terry Eagleton (1983) observed that the study of English literature emerged in Victorian England as a means of reproducing and extending hegemonic English values across the class spectrum of its own subjects, as well as to colonial dominions in order to replicate an English humanistic model. In other words, English literature was used to cultivate an imperial subjectivity, one that was decidedly anthropocentric. These imperial and colonial origins of literary education (and education more broadly) remain salient as the politics of inclusions, exclusions, denials, and ejections are further entrenched and complicated. At the same time, there have always been texts that defied easy appropriation into the prescribed ideological order, works that offer implicit and explicit challenges to the productivist, futurist goals of colonial and settler-colonial empire. Typically, however, literary education reconstitutes and disciplines the teaching of such books by applying “ideological blinders” (Thompson 1978) that narrow the messages and ideas emerging from the texts. Literary education typically directs teachers and students to read around subversive material so as to arrive at hegemonic conclusions. This is especially true in how we are encouraged to read the more-than-human (McHugh 2011); canonized “animal stories” (e.g. Animal Farm, Watership Down) are framed as anthropocentric and merely allegorical. Increasingly, however, educators and educational scholars are becoming attuned to the concerns of the more-than-human as a result of the posthumanist and animal “turns” in the academy, as well as growing interest in animals in society more broadly.
In this context, I posit that the works of H.G. Wells warrant greater attention. Two of his classic dystopian novels, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, have been mainstays of secondary English education for generations, but I see compelling potential in them to disrupt anthropocentrism, as well as hegemonic human-animal instrumentalism and alterity, and expand students’ empathetic and reflexive lenses through a proto-post-humanism. Specifically, Wells’s fantastical visions transport the reader into seemingly unfamiliar spaces and circumstances but which resonate with cultural, political, socio-economic and technological anxieties that are all too familiar. The reader is thus challenged to morph into a role akin to Donna Haraway’s notion of the “modest witness” (2008). This defamiliarized positionality encourages the reader to observe the “webs of connections” so often obscured by the anthropocentric lens ascribed through literary education. Central to this alterized re-positioning is an interrogation of the consequences human systems hold for ‘others’ and their worlds, particularly those animals caught up in our machinery. In this way, Wells’s works demonstrate the hybridized potential of seeing within and beyond one’s own species membership by occupying the interstitial “third space,” one that Bhabha argues allows us to “elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves” (56, 1994).

Author

• John William Drew, The University of Western Ontario