The first meeting of the 2018 American Area Seminar will take place on Friday, January 19, from noon to 1:00 pm in 242 O'Shaughnessy Hall.
Aleksandra Hernandez will give a talk titled "Wild or Domestic? Jack London's Sensuous Animality by Stream and Virtual Animality by Fire."
"Is there such a thing as animal imagination? And how might its nature change from a condition of wildness to the condition of domestication? American naturalist writer Jack London suggests an answer to these questions in his imaginative forays into the inner world of dogs. Writing alongside women advocates for animal welfare and the so-called nature fakers who believed in the reality of animal emotion and reason, London thinks about the imagination from a Darwinian perspective in Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), in an effort to chart the effects human domestication practices might have on the inner lives of animals."
The Notre Dame American Area Seminar is a collective of faculty and graduate students from English and affiliated departments meeting monthly to discuss the most exciting new work in the field. For more information, contact Matt Wilkens (mwilkens@nd.edu).