'Coleridge wrote that ‘Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.’ In his epic, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ published in 1798, the albatross is an uncertain presence, neither its species or colour is specified. It displays affection, presaging hope, guiding the ship and accompanying its crew for ‘food or play.’ But once the mariner randomly shoots the bird, the albatross becomes a burden, morphing into a symbol of atonement. Unnaturally slung from the mariner’s neck it crosses a boundary between the physical and moral world. The mariner endures seven days without rain or wind, suffering fever, hallucinations, the death of his crew and shipwreck. Native to the south polar seas, albatrosses were rarely sighted by European sailors, an early source being Cook’s voyages. There is overall agreement that Coleridge’s source was George Shelvocke’s account of a black albatross, also known as ‘sooty albatross’ or ‘quakerbird’, which he encountered during his round the world voyage, 1719-22. The bird was shot by the second captain because it was considered an ill-omen when the winds were unfavourable. Certainly, the albatross is othered in the poem, not merely by the laws of hospitality but by its uncharacteristic depiction and by the mythical, male-centred language that Coleridge used.'  (Introduction)

'In this essay, I show that J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is shaped fundamentally by an engagement with Joyce’s Ulysses. However, the relationship between the two does not reveal itself in the rewriting of Joyce’s ‘Penelope’ that Costello’s literary and feminist reputation relies on, but through a range of references to ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, the ninth episode of Ulysses set in the National Library of Ireland and populated exclusively by men. Elizabeth Costello alludes to ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, I argue, because its philosophical dialogue, its dramatic form, its preoccupation with creativity, its investment in the life and reputation of the writer, and its attentiveness to the materiality of writing, offer Coetzee a model for his literary-philosophical experiments of the period. Drawing on archival evidence and published sources, the essay explores the apparent contradiction between Costello’s avowed feminist reclamation of Molly Bloom and the consistent intertextual engagement with ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, positioning the question of gender centrally within Coetzee’s broader engagement with philosophy in this period.' (Publication abstract)

'Sympathy, understood to be the capacity to suffer with the other, has long been regarded as one of the major vehicles to inspire an ethical communion. By minimizing differences through identification, sympathy helps us resonate with other beings and to exist in relation to them. This thesis examines the ethical endeavors on the vexed question of sympathy in four works by J. M. Coetzee - - The Lives of Animals (1999), Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005), all of which manifest Coetzee's notable interest in a fully-engaged sympathetic imagination into depraved and deprived human or nonhuman subjects. ' (Thesis summary)

'The power of literature has the ability to elevate the lives of others, including non-human animals. This is poignantly dramatised in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello. The titular character of this fiction asserts that literature has the capacity to imagine and inhabit the existence of others, including non-human animals. If this is possible then animal life can be represented as being just as valuable as a human life. In Elizabeth Costello we are confronted with ethical and moral questions to do with the valuing human above that of non-human animals.'

Source: Abstract.