Questioning the Notion of Speciesism in Select Poems of Peter Reading’s Faunal

Abstract

Eco-criticism, as a word, traces back to William Rueckert's 1978 essay "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism" and apparently lay dormant in critical vocabulary until the 1989 Western Literature Association meeting where Cheryll Glotfelty used it to substitute the idea of nature study by the study of relationship between literature and physical environment. Nature is often constructed and perceived as we human want to create and portray it where human is taken to be the cardinal point and nature, the periphery of concern. The idea of eco-criticism with a covert apocalyptic view tends to centralize nature as the essential entity of survival. Speciesism, as an idea was first introduced by Richard D. Rider, and popularized by the Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, in his book Animal Liberation which defines it as "a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species." This paper intends to analyze select poems of Peter Reading’s Faunal to dig out the discrepancies in the idea of eco-criticism and deep ecology by using the concept of speciesism. Neither human nor animal are more important than each other. Both are equally endangered and threatened in the deteriorating conditions of environment because they are equally dependent on each other for growth and survival. Reading’s poems try to articulate this equality between human and nonhuman where all needs to be saved from the upcoming odds.