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The Lives of Animals (Paperback)
Loot Price: R356
Discovery Miles 3 560
You Save: R117
(25%)
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The Lives of Animals (Paperback)
Series: Princeton Classics
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List price R473
Loot Price R356
Discovery Miles 3 560
You Save R117 (25%)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth
Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another
person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her
to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place
on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across
the world. Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her
literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal
rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her
argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to
reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his
mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority. At the
dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello
with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of
animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological,
and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth
Costello seems offensive and flaky, but--dare he admit
it?--strangely on target. In this landmark book, Nobel
Prize-winning writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a
powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their
complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of
mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from
humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a
Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values
at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting
the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on
an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university.
Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human
conviction--Coetzee brings all these elements into play. As in the
story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by
responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives,
delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text
is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy
Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger,
primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and
moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation.
Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable
social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and
confrontation.
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