Humans, Animals, Monsters and Machines: From Gulliver’s Travels to
King Kong
Dr John Miller
Since the last decade of the twentieth century, the emerging critical fields of posthumanism and
animal studies have approached the ‘human’ as an increasingly unstable and contested term.
For posthumanists, radical technoscientific advances (genetic engineering and artificial
intelligence, for example) have produced new modes of being for which conventional notions
of ‘humanity’ seem inadequate. At the same time, animal studies, arising out of concerns at the
fate of other species in our industrial age, has questioned whether humans can really be
considered ethically and biologically exceptional from other animals. The common result of
posthumanism and animal studies is that ‘human’ may no longer mean what we thought it
meant. Although these debates often focus on contemporary culture, the eighteenth, nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries are seminal periods for thinking through the complexities and
ambiguities that surround understandings of ‘the human’. Industrialisation, urbanisation,
technological innovation, Empire, Darwinism and the rise of environmental and animal welfare
movements all had radical impacts on the way that ‘humanity’ was perceived and represented.
This module, therefore, examines imaginings of the ‘human’ in relation to machines and
animals (and those monsters that are neither one thing nor the other) throughout the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries and into the twentieth. We will focus for the most part on prose
fiction, its historical and cultural contexts and on selected readings from the period’s key
thinkers of human being (including Rousseau, Darwin, Marx and Freud), alongside more
recent theories of humans, posthumans and animals. The module’s aim is to encourage critical
engagement with this key issue and to facilitate a deeper appreciation of the period’s literature,
culture and politics, including the relationship of discourses of technology and species to
discourses of class, gender and race.