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Remembering the Elephant: Animal Reason before the Eighteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Bryan Alkemeyer
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Abstract

Especially before the eighteenth century, many European writers regarded not apes but elephants as the most humanlike animals because of their high intelligence, even rationality. The largely forgotten rational elephant can help us read early modern anthropocentrism against itself and distinguish early modernity from modernity in ways that historicize—and denaturalize—these periods' different speciesisms. Giovanni Battista Gelli's La Circe (1549), for instance, produces a philosophy of human exceptionalism by suppressing the elephant's natural history—whether propagandistically or ironically. Subsequent texts by writers from Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, to Pope, Buffon, and Pennant, in the eighteenth, demonstrate that the rational elephant threatens human exceptionalism even after Descartes's seventeenth-century and Linnaeus's eighteenth-century interventions. Though speciesist itself, the rational elephant reveals a bygone paradigm more capable than the modern one of acknowledging rationality across bodily differences. It also provides a historically grounded vantage point from which the primacy of the primates can be overthrown.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 5 , October 2017 , pp. 1149 - 1165
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Modern Language Association of America

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