Annotate Otis’ essay following guidelines in the annotation assignment.  Use your notes to write a response that incorporates textual evidence from the novel, primary materials from the appendix, and/or Otis’s analysis.

 

Otis analyzes Heart and Science’s important cultural context in her essay.  To complete the annotation assignment, active reading was required, but I also found the essay interesting.  The assignment helped me reflect on my strengths and weaknesses regarding active reading.

Instead of summarizing every paragraph in my own words, I frequently underline words, phrases, or sentences that help me identify what the paragraph is about when I return to the text; I summarize only when a section is particularly challenging or if the author lists, like in the first full paragraph on pg. 29 where Otis explains Ferrier’s experimental methods.

 

 

I frequently make “Personal Interest” notes that fall under the “Connections” category.  Otis introduces women’s role in the vivisection debate on pg. 32, and, in addition to underlining, I made several notes on how I could analyze her argument through a feminist lens.  I also often make personal interest notes I’ll probably never use when writing literary analyses but that I simply find interesting or that spark an emotion in me. This type of note funnels down to my primary passion for English and why I chose to pursue the subject in the first place.

 

 

Otis’ essay sparked a couple text-to-text notes from me. The vivisection debate surfaced in Dr. Susan McHugh’s “Dog Stories” course.  We read Mikhail Bulgakov’s Russian novella, Heart of a Dog (1925), and Nick Abadzis’ British graphic novel, Laika(2007) (which albeit dealt more with animal experimentation than vivisection specifically).  The mad scientist motif, manifested by Dr. Benjulia, directly corresponds to Frankenstein, hence the two texts’ pairing in “Methods.”

Otis uses Heart and Science (1883) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) to create a dichotomy between anti-vivisection and (cautiously) pro-vivisection 19thcentury English literature.  I question this binary.  I am curious to know what other late 19thcentury English texts tackle the vivisection debate and how they add to the narrative.  How would adding a Russian text, like Bulgakov’s, alter Otis’ argument?  From Farmer’s appendices, we know Lewis Carroll was an anti-vivisectionist and that Robert Browning composed anti-vivisection poetry, so other late 19thcentury English evidence for literature’s role in vivisection debate exists.