Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel write in the Preface to their book, Animal Geographies: Place, Politics and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, that

animals have been so indispensable to the structure of human affairs and so tied up with our visions of progress and the good life that we have been unable to (even try to) fully see them. Their very centrality prompted us to simply look away and to ignore their fates. But human practices now threaten the animal world and the entire global environment as never before. Our own futures are on the line too. Hence we have an intellectual responsibility as well as an ethical duty to consider the lives of animals closely. (Wolch and Emel 1998: xi)

And the psychologist James Hillman asks in his book, Dream Animals: Why do they come to us? What do they want, inhabiting our dreams? ... We may guess why they enter our dreams and interpret them according to our guesses. But these interpretations may distort our sight, especially that degrading belief that they come for our subjective purposes, to compensate our omissions... (Hillman 1997:13)

The symbiosis between the physical distributions of these sometimes astonishingly autonomous, coherent, individual creatures around us - animals, wild and domestic - and their literary and psychological presences and effects in all our lives, is a relationship which holds the promise of endless avenues for reassessment of those lives. Any close reassessment is likely to confront us with, at the very least, our own troubling animality, our accelerating destruction of most other species, and our potential for redemptive compassion. And what is the role of the written word - literature - in forging and expressing these relationships?

The second Literature & Ecology Colloquium, held at Rhodes University in September 2005, offered a forum for scholars to extend the still embryonic field of ecologically-informed criticism in southern Africa. Despite the range of approaches - philosophical, anthropological, ecocritical - the colloquium topic proved sufficiently focussed to generate considerable synergy between papers. The eleven papers selected for publication here do only partial justice to the vivacity of proceedings. At least a couple of offerings were too performative to be captured in formal papers, notably Penny Bernard (Anthropology, Rhodes) speaking on Africa's python god, and Dylan McGarry (Environmental Sciences, Rhodes) comparing the treatment of cattle in Indian and Xhosa cultures. Independent scholar Aman Bloom's talk on "Animal Individuality", though self-styled as a series of "unsupported assertions", nevertheless touched on the core themes of many of the papers that followed: the desire, need, or moral imperative to view animals as sentient, even spiritualised individuals within human-damaged or constructed eco-systems is perhaps the most persistent note struck here. It is a note generally non-scientific, even anti-rationalist; it is perhaps not surprising that the humanities in general, and creative literatures in particular, wish to carve out a space of investigation better aligned with "soul" than with strands of DNA.

Nevertheless, an energising interface of literary enterprise with hard science - one of the aims of the colloquium - was not wholly absent. Despite the colloquium's title, only one animal geographer was inspired to offer a paper: Shirley Brooks (UKZN) here offers another in her series of pioneering articles, published over a number of years, mapping the congruences of human discourses and pragmatic management of individual wild species - in this case rhinos. In a somewhat sketchy, but (in view of the colloquium's mandate) exemplary collaboration between a literary scholar and a biologist, Ian Glenn and Ed Rybicki (UCT) offer an exploration of some animal poems by Douglas Livingstone who, of course, combined poetry and science in his own person. That these various discourses, sometimes only quasi-scientific, have a long and complex history, is illuminated by Ian Glenn's other discussion here of the influence of Rousseau's philosophy on the writings and behaviour of Levaillant and Eugene Marais. Levaillant's pet baboon Kees, and Marais' own "friends" among the baboons, individualise those animals, in strong contradistinction to those ethological modes which tend to view animals rather as predictable confluences of societal behaviour; to the demeaning commodification of animals by consumerist technology (exposed by Les Mitchell in a paper on farming discourses entitled "Science, machines and slaves"); and to the politicised modes of stereotyping symbolisation.

It was one of the pleasures of the colloquium to host presentations by a number of postgraduate students, one of whom was Laura Pechey (Cambridge). Pechey here presents a cogent overview of how the baboon has been used as just such a symbol by successive waves of South African political opportunists, mostly angling for expressions of indigeneity and land-ownership in this apartheid-riven country. It is an interesting, more literary parallel to Brooks's rhino study. It is arguable, perhaps, whether Douglas Livingstone was not being similarly, though scarcely politically, exploitative in his use of a tigress in his fantasial and parabolic poem "Descent from the Tower"; this poem is carefully unpacked from an ecocritical perspective by Mariss Everitt (recently graduated MA from Rhodes).

A third postgraduate's article we are glad to print here takes us further into the area of the symbolic and fictional: Jayne Glover (PhD, Rhodes) lucidly examines the metaphor of the horse Yori in Doris Lessing's science-fiction novel, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five. This paper rubbed shoulders interestingly with two other papers, both valuable though they did not find space here, and both spiritual in orientation: Yasien Mohamed (UWC) explored the moral-didactic dimensions of animal metaphors in ancient Arabic and Greek texts, and Dianne Shober (MA student, Fort Hare) presented an exegesis of the lion symbolism in C S Lewis's Narnia tales. As Shober outlined, such religious and folkloric animal imageries also have a deep history in human consciousness, with astonishingly various modern manifestations. One such manifestation is in recent children's literature, some Zimbabwean examples of which were revealed by Robert Muponde (WISER). Another spiritual expression was in the sometimes quasi-folkloric adventures of Rider Haggard, the animal-spirit aspects of which are here newly laid out in its biographical development by John Senior (Fort Hare). Both Muponde's and Senior's papers, as well as a number of others including my own on neglected Zimbabwean poet Harold Farmer, work across the fractured boundary of the colonial and post-colonial, in which questions of race, belonging and indigeneity are as prominent as questions of spiritual universality.

If literature in some way domesticates even the wild animal, the lure of an autonomous wildness keeps challenging our own limitations and abuses. One nexus of this problem - the raising, part-habituation, and release of big cats - is examined in three cognate texts by women in Wendy Woodward's (UWC) paper here: her very real, if shamanistically-viewed predators are fascinatingly contrastive with Lewis's Narnia lion. Domestication of the wild through film - mentioned by Woodward and other presenters, and arguably a far more influential medium today than the written word - is a particularly important cultural phenomenon: Pat Louw (Zululand) here makes an important start on a taxonomy of nature documentaries, with a particular focus on South African examples. The need for further analysis in this area can scarcely be over-emphasised.

If the "wild ones" - the baboons, the rhinos, the leopards - may be temporarily habituated or incarcerated within real or verbal human-created spaces, there are also those species who have, in a sense, tamed us, or at least coevolved into a different relationship with us: notably dogs and cats. Samantha Rump (Rhodes) presented some of her Honours dissertation's findings on the therapeutic value of pets to the aged; Arthur Rose (MA student, UCT) explored the presence of dogs and cats in J M Coetzee's Age of Iron. Coetzee, perhaps surprisingly given the frequency with which The Lives of Animals is cited these days, attracted only one other paper, read in her absence, by Laura Wright of Wagner College, USA. Wright's discussion of Coetzee's dogs as occupying a transitional symbolic space between the end of one order and the beginning of another, echoed in some ways Louise Green's deft exploration, printed here, on dogs as representing an "intermediate culture". In presenting an analysis of (among other aspects) the dog packs in Russell Hoban's post-apocalyptic fantasy novel Riddley Walker, Green (postdoc, UCT) touches on that especially sensitive and complex wrestle between control and autonomy, domesticated and wild, which necessarily governs all of our relations with animal life.

It was refreshing that not all the papers were southern African in content; the treatment of species in other quarters of the world unquestionably holds lessons for, and parallels to, the treatment of South Africa's. In this regard, we particularly welcomed anthropologist Robert Bieder (Indiana University), who presented a version of a chapter from his most recent book, Bear. By comparison with other papers, Bieder's presentation is lightly theorised - seems even, in a manner reminiscent of an older generation of ethnology, 'pre-theory': rather, he tells us a lot of vivid stories, reminding us usefully that this is, after all, where our study, and maybe indeed all of culture, begins - in the tale itself. Bieder cites one Native American woman: "We are all bears."

It is not a criticism of the quality of these papers, so much as a pointer towards future study, that I want to remark on some gaps. The absence of scientists I have already noted. Glen Love, in Practical Ecocriticism, rightly echoes scientists who baulk at writers' and critics' distorted or oversimplified uses of scientific concepts like ecology, and argues that we ecocritics need to learn a great deal more science. Current science and ecology, in whatever bowdlerised forms - and the bowdlerisation itself must be a focus of investigation - increasingly appear in literary works, and we cannot avoid incorporating them into our critical frameworks, any more than we can avoid recognising the impact of Darwin's thought on many late nineteenth-century novels. Hence I will continue to invite scientists to the colloquium, hoping they will take the opportunity to teach us.

As it is, the words 'ecology' and 'ecocriticism' are noticably absent from most of these papers; nationally, we (and I include myself here) are apparently still at a stage of considerable theoretical naivety; at some point, perhaps in a few years, a colloquium might fruitfully be devoted to just this issue. In the meanwhile, much work remains to catch up with the philosophical, theoretical and meta-theoretical debates already in full flow elsewhere in the world. Similarly, while almost all these papers in some way gesture towards the profound philosophical, existential and ecological implications around animal language and spirituality, anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, none demonstrate much awareness of, or engage with, the wide-ranging literature on these controversial issues already available.