Experimental Animals: Science, Form, and Hybridity in Contemporary ‘Lab Lit’

The Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film and the Organisms and Us research cluster will be co-hosting a seminar with Dr Shannon Lambert (Ghent University) on experimental animals in fiction.

Since the institutionalisation of science in the nineteenth century, animal experimentation—especially with ‘animal models’ frequently used to approximate the workings of the human body—has become a standard, and often mandatory, component of biomedical research. This talk explores how fictional works engaging with biomedicine and experimental animals, might function as “literary laboratories” (Elgin 2007) where perceived boundaries between humans and nonhuman animals are experimented with, tested, and challenged. In fictional works such as Karen Joy Fowler’s “Us” (2013) and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013), nonhuman animals introduce layers of hybridity: physiologically, in the depiction of human-like animal bodies or bodies modified with human genetic material, and, textually, in the use of cognitive-literary strategies like anthropomorphism and narrative empathy. This talk lingers on these forms of hybridity to consider the ‘messy’ aspects of using animals as stand-ins for the human. In particular, it explores the kinds of corporeal and conceptual slipperiness raised by interspecies encounters in science.

When: Friday 3rd March, 3-4 PM

Where: Ingkarni Wardli, Level 7

Dr Shannon Lambert is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. Her work on topics like science and narrative, environmental affect, and the nonhuman in literature has been published in journals such as American Imago, ISLE, and SubStance. Her current project, “Fictions of Bio-Messiness, ” explores animal experimentation in Anglophone fiction from 1945 to the present.