[Feature] The Animal and the Human: The Question of Literature and Elizabeth Costello / Hwang Jung-a
The Quarterly Changbi 171, Spring 2016
Abstract
Hwang Jung-a, the literary critic, develops her argument of Elizabeth Costello, a novel by J. M. Coetzee, by taking it as an exemplum of literary works to carry out the ethical and intellectual task. Focusing on the border between the animal and the human depicted in the novel, she suggests that the perspective of human beings of animals, which could be called anthropocentric, quite exactly corresponds to the way human beings perceive themselves, and thus it is here in the drastic change of animal-human relationship that we can find more plausible way toward a new civilization.