ENGL 1302:037 Spring 2005
Due Thursday 28 April
30 points
Pierre Boulle's novel Planet of the Apes explores a dynamic that Steven Pinker invokes here and there in The Blank Slate: the idea
"that people discern a moral circle that may not embrace all human beings but only the members of their clan, village, or tribe. Inside the circle, fellow humans are targets of sympathy; outside, they are treated like a rock or a river or a lump of food" (Pinker, The Blank Slate, NY: Viking 2002, p. 320).
Or, one might add, outsiders can be forced to work for insiders or used as research subjects. In other words, outsiders can be placed partially in the category of animals -- alive and sentient but non-human -- and exploited accordingly without violating taboos against exploitation of human insiders.
By flipping humans and apes on his "planet of the apes," Boulle raises issues of how we treat apes and other primates, but just as importantly, issues of how we treat humans when we declare certain humans to be outsiders.
In an essay (maximum five pages) use ideas from Pinker's Blank Slate or from other reference sources you have encountered this semester to do two things:
1) identify an argument (main, side, tangential, or implicit) in Planet of the Apes
2) agree or disagree with that argument, from an informed perspective.
Remember that a novel is even less "academic" in its argumentative style than a popular-academic text like The Blank Slate. Novels deliberately manipulate your sympathies and emotions; bias and suppression of opposing arguments are fine; Boulle is under no obligation to argue in a balanced way. But as an academic critic of fiction, you're under the constraint of arguing about the novel in a balanced and fair way.