About this episode

The episode explores how stories about animals reflect human values and the complexities of the animal-human bond.

Since the days of Aesop, stories about animals have been used to explore distinctly human values, virtues, and vices. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider such childhood classics as E. B. White’s “Stuart Little” and C. S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” series, as well as “The Sheep Detectives,” a recent entry in this canon that centers on a flock who learn poignant lessons about life and loss. Works of adult literature, too, have explored the animal-human bond. Our tendency to project onto animals translates to the real world in strange ways, with figures like Timmy the Whale and Punch the Monkey going viral on our social feeds even as our day-to-day lives are more detached from the natural world than ever before. But the distance between us can be instructive, too. “Reckoning with their similarity to us and also their total strangeness to us . . . that’s where works about animals really get me,” Schwartz says. “Not just as a direct transfer onto the human experience but also this other thing that really does enrich our lives: to be in contact with species that are not our own.” Read, watch, and listen with the…

People in this episode

Host: Vinson Cunningham

Guests: Naomi Fry, Alexandra Schwartz

Topics covered

• animal stories
• human values
• literature
• childhood classics
• animal-human bond
• cultural analysis

Keywords

• animal kingdom
• literature
• human values
• Aesop
• E. B. White
• C. S. Lewis
• cultural commentary

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Stuart Little, Chronicles of Narnia, The Sheep Detectives, Homer’s Odyssey, Stone Fox, The Mare, Bambi, The Lion King, Tom and Jerry, Aesop’s Fables

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