Anja Höing - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Anja Höing
Routledge eBooks, Aug 12, 2022
Routledge eBooks, Aug 12, 2022
The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature, edited by Douglas Vakoch, 2022
The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature, edited by Douglas Vakoch, 2022
Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, 2020
The author examines the role of animal characters in eighteenth-century and Romantic-period moral... more The author examines the role of animal characters in eighteenth-century and Romantic-period moral tales for children, concentrating on a selection of stories by Dorothy Kilner and Sarah Trimmer which either feature an animal narrator or are focalised through an animal character. Such tales take their point of departure, Hoing argues, in a sense of the ontological closeness of animal and infant, of their shared lack of adult rationality. Hence, the animal characters are used in these stories as both a metaphor for and a metonym of the child reader, whose moral education requires them to identify with but also to transcend the pre-rational animal protagonist. The narrative structures of these tales, in Hoing’s analysis, therefore combine both an Enlightenment view of infancy as a limited developmental stage with an emergent Romantic valorisation of the sensibility and sympathy of infancy.
This chapter examines Gothic elements in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs, focusing on the manifol... more This chapter examines Gothic elements in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs, focusing on the manifold ways in which the uncanny links to the animal other. The chapter explores how Adams’s talking animal story harnesses what Gamer calls the ‘protean’ propensities of the Gothic to an animal rights agenda. Hoing shows that The Plague Dogs deconstructs the Gothic animal as a mere screen to project human anxieties on, while the novel also utilises Gothic motifs to foreground the real-life animal. The Plague Dogs, so Hoing argues, ultimately employs a method of what Goddu terms ‘haunting back’ in order to unmask the danger inherent to reading a real-life animal as a reflection of human fears. In doing so, the novel invites reflections on both the Gothic mode as such and the status of companion animals in an anthropocentric world.
Humans and Animals: Intersecting Lives and Worlds, 2016
Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade, 2019
This chapter argues that the openness and egalitarianism of scientific discourse to be found in T... more This chapter argues that the openness and egalitarianism of scientific discourse to be found in Terry Pratchett’s Nation functions as an alternative to the hierarchical structures imposed by colonialism. In addition, the chapter discusses the ways in which Pratchett attributes liminal potential to religious beliefs and posits the suggestion that pantheism is the most appropriate religious belief system within the social-scientific framework of his model post-colonial society. Finally, the chapter argues that Nation highlights the importance for young readers of addressing and critically reflecting on the issue of their own belief systems, in order to manage the difficulties of 21st-century living.
Abstract:In Gill Lewis’s debut novel, Sky Hawk (2011) two children befriend a wounded osprey, sta... more Abstract:In Gill Lewis’s debut novel, Sky Hawk (2011) two children befriend a wounded osprey, starting a chain reaction that ultimately saves a Ghambian girl. However, the animal itself becomes increasingly decorporalized in the process. As this article argues, the human-animal bond in Sky Hawk becomes stronger the more indirect the children’s means of relating to the animal become. Lewis’s human characters can only relate to the symbolic animal, not the real one. While Sky Hawk, on the one hand, is unsettingly anthropocentric and negates direct access to the animal, the story also encourages to dare a metaphoric approach to animals.
Plants in Children's and Young Adult Literature
Humanities
Richard Adams's talking animal story The Plague Dogs (1978), with its deeply genre-atypical mode ... more Richard Adams's talking animal story The Plague Dogs (1978), with its deeply genre-atypical mode of narration, offers a multiplicity of avenues to explore the literary animal as animal. The story draws much of its power from the psychological complexity and related unreliability of both canine narrators, two research lab escapees gone feral. Both the terrier Snitter and the black mongrel Rowf are mentally ill and experience a highly subjective, part-fantastic world. In episodes of zero focalization, a sarcastic voice comments on the plot from the off, aggressively attacking a thoroughly anthropocentric superstructure the protagonists themselves are oblivious of, and presenting all that is normally constructed as "rational" in the implied reader's world as a carnivalesque farce. Combining these equally unreliable narratives, The Plague Dogs creates a unique mixture of what Phelan (2007) calls "estranging" and "bonding" unreliability and brings to light the devastating consequences of anthropocentrism. The Plague Dogs not only defamiliarizes a genre usually committed to conventional means of storytelling, but the dominant Western conception of the status of animals in the world, showing that once we start to read the animal as animal, this sets into motion an avalanche of other concepts in need of re-reading, among them the very ones making up the fundamental pillars of Western societies' anthropocentric self-conception.
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2021
In Gill Lewis’s debut novel, Sky Hawk (2011) two children befriend a wounded osprey, starting a c... more In Gill Lewis’s debut novel, Sky Hawk (2011) two children befriend a wounded osprey, starting a chain reaction that ultimately saves a Ghambian girl. However, the animal itself becomes increasingly decorporalized in the process. As this article argues, the human-animal bond in Sky Hawk becomes stronger the more indirect the children’s means of relating to the animal become. Lewis’s human characters can only relate to the symbolic animal, not the real one. While Sky Hawk, on the one hand, is unsettingly anthropocentric and negates direct access to the animal, the story also encourages to dare a metaphoric approach to animals.
Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, 2020
Gothic Animals - Uncanny Otherness and the Animal With-Out, 2020
British author Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs (1977) challenges far more than vivisection and ot... more British author Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs (1977) challenges far more than vivisection and other forms of cruelty to animals. This anthology chapter, approaching Adams’s talking dog story through the lens of the Gothic, argues that The Plague Dogs puts into question the very foundation of the dualist distinctions employed to separate Self from Other, Human from Animal, and, most centrally, Within from Without. In a labyrinth-like network of uncanny elements that turn The Plague Dogs into a nightmarish allegory of Otherness itself, the borders of Within and Without are entirely obliterated, leaving the reader without the slightest anchoring point to makes sense of the story in any conventional way. There is only one thing that ties together all Gothic elements in the story: an underlying conviction that the animal that really matters is the real animal, the ‘animal without’, and that humans averted their gaze from this animal for far too long – and at their own peril.
Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade, 2019
Anglistik, 2019
Stories of humans and their companion animals have fascinated the reading public for centuries. W... more Stories of humans and their companion animals have fascinated the reading public for centuries. While in the 20th century most such stories implicitly served to reinforce anthropocentric structures and humanist philosophies, this paper argues that British companion animal stories of the 21st century often narrate distinctively different stories that set out a posthuman, rather than a humanist agenda. Instead of ever-loyal dogs and plucky cats, the animal protagonists the reader encounters frequently are uncanny ones: secretly talking genetically modified creatures, family pets with (often distinctively dark) agendas of their own, cats with transformative powers or dogs whose apparently innocent actions turn out to be inspired by ideologies the human characters cannot fathom. Uncanny companion animal characters such as Prince, the dog hero of Matt Haig’s The Last Family in England (2004), or Roger, the supernatural cat of Lynn Truss’s horror satire Cat out of Hell (2014) are precariously posed on the boundaries between human and non-human, nature and culture, and often – through the intervention of genetic engineering and bio-technology – nature and technology as well. Such companion animal stories frequently transgress boundaries: not only do the pets forcefully undermine the animal-human border and negate any form of dualist self/other or nature/culture distinction; companion animal narratives also blur genre distinctions. The intellect, and often language, of the uncanny pet introduces fantastic elements into what at a first glance appear to be realistic worlds, and as talking animals in particular most commonly inhabit children’s literature, but in 21st century stories frequently appear in adult fiction as well, target groups too remain tantalizingly undefined. In its literary conspecies and other pets, Derrida’s cat has been joined by a multitude of other voices of the non-human that, as I will argue, inhabit a posthuman narrative spaces and urge for a redefinition not only of the human / companion animal relationship, but of the very idea of ‘humanness’.
Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen, and In-Between, 2018
Child and young adult characters in popular British children’s fiction often develop their own ag... more Child and young adult characters in popular British children’s fiction often develop their own agency in interaction with an animal protagonist or sidekick with whom they team up against a corrupt, materialist adult world. Both child and animal are united by the crushing experience that their voices tend to be ignored by adult humans.This chapter approaches representations of children’s and young adults’ agency from an ecocritical point of view, arguing that such representations of agency draw on a Romantic image of the child as in unison with nature. Many popular children’s stories construct children’s agency as emanating from a friction in a stark nature/culture divide which the child protagonists alone are able to transgress. Drawing power and self-confidence from transgressing such boundaries, the child characters discover and develop their own capacities of agency in interconnection with animals. In consequence, they discover forms of agency inaccessible to adults that might even potentially disrupt hegemonic structures. The animals’ functions in these stories are diverse: some are passive recipients of direly-needed human help, others serve as catalysts only, remaining unaffected by the agency they trigger in the child. Other develop their own agency, child and animal standing united against an ‘unnatural’ adult realm. Other stories again construct ‘animality’ in the child, using animal transformation as trigger to unleash the child’s power of agency. All these stories construct their representations of children from intersecting the human with the non-human, the natural with the cultural, and the self with the other, presenting as most central to the formation of children’s and young adults’ agency the undefined interim spaces at which these dualist categories reach their limits.
Animal stories, especially anthropomorphic ones, are chronically underrepresented in scholarship.... more Animal stories, especially anthropomorphic ones, are chronically underrepresented in scholarship. Traditional literary criticism disregards them as a minor side-branch of children’s fiction in which metaphoric animals idle through Arcadian worlds, teaching the child reader lessons on the beauties of nature and the importance of conservation. Yet, when interlinking a traditional critical approach with Ecofeminism, one can see that these stories deserve far closer attention than they usually get. Using animal protagonists as a shield, authors can write in a protective sand-box, hiding patriarchal ideologies behind biologistic arguments and re-shaping ‘the natural’ to their convenience. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is notorious for its all-male world, and although female characters tend to ‘invade’ the genre in the late 20th and early 21st century, they do so at their own peril, often becoming an integral part of patriarchal structures. Female characters are generally of secondary importance, “breeding stock” as the narrator in Richard Adams’s Watership Down pointedly remarks. Reinforcing traditional gender rules, females often appear as the possession of the males, obediently stay at home and rear the young, excluded from culture, decision-making, and, of course, leadership. True to the woman/nature analogy their naïve innocence renders them closer to nature, and simultaneously forces them into utterly passive positions. Often democratic or matriarchal structures are overthrown in order to re-establish a semi-feudal patriarchal hierarchy. Presenting all the above-mentioned structures as ‘natural’ and therefore right, the genre serves as a retreat for patriarchal myths. Traditional literary criticism lacks the methodology to address these issues. Hence, Ecofeminism, in connection with Ecocriticism and Animal Studies, can offer a unique contribution to the study of children’s animal stories and help to dismantle the invisibility cloak ‘the natural’ throws over patriarchal ideologies.
Routledge eBooks, Aug 12, 2022
Routledge eBooks, Aug 12, 2022
The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature, edited by Douglas Vakoch, 2022
The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature, edited by Douglas Vakoch, 2022
Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, 2020
The author examines the role of animal characters in eighteenth-century and Romantic-period moral... more The author examines the role of animal characters in eighteenth-century and Romantic-period moral tales for children, concentrating on a selection of stories by Dorothy Kilner and Sarah Trimmer which either feature an animal narrator or are focalised through an animal character. Such tales take their point of departure, Hoing argues, in a sense of the ontological closeness of animal and infant, of their shared lack of adult rationality. Hence, the animal characters are used in these stories as both a metaphor for and a metonym of the child reader, whose moral education requires them to identify with but also to transcend the pre-rational animal protagonist. The narrative structures of these tales, in Hoing’s analysis, therefore combine both an Enlightenment view of infancy as a limited developmental stage with an emergent Romantic valorisation of the sensibility and sympathy of infancy.
This chapter examines Gothic elements in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs, focusing on the manifol... more This chapter examines Gothic elements in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs, focusing on the manifold ways in which the uncanny links to the animal other. The chapter explores how Adams’s talking animal story harnesses what Gamer calls the ‘protean’ propensities of the Gothic to an animal rights agenda. Hoing shows that The Plague Dogs deconstructs the Gothic animal as a mere screen to project human anxieties on, while the novel also utilises Gothic motifs to foreground the real-life animal. The Plague Dogs, so Hoing argues, ultimately employs a method of what Goddu terms ‘haunting back’ in order to unmask the danger inherent to reading a real-life animal as a reflection of human fears. In doing so, the novel invites reflections on both the Gothic mode as such and the status of companion animals in an anthropocentric world.
Humans and Animals: Intersecting Lives and Worlds, 2016
Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade, 2019
This chapter argues that the openness and egalitarianism of scientific discourse to be found in T... more This chapter argues that the openness and egalitarianism of scientific discourse to be found in Terry Pratchett’s Nation functions as an alternative to the hierarchical structures imposed by colonialism. In addition, the chapter discusses the ways in which Pratchett attributes liminal potential to religious beliefs and posits the suggestion that pantheism is the most appropriate religious belief system within the social-scientific framework of his model post-colonial society. Finally, the chapter argues that Nation highlights the importance for young readers of addressing and critically reflecting on the issue of their own belief systems, in order to manage the difficulties of 21st-century living.
Abstract:In Gill Lewis’s debut novel, Sky Hawk (2011) two children befriend a wounded osprey, sta... more Abstract:In Gill Lewis’s debut novel, Sky Hawk (2011) two children befriend a wounded osprey, starting a chain reaction that ultimately saves a Ghambian girl. However, the animal itself becomes increasingly decorporalized in the process. As this article argues, the human-animal bond in Sky Hawk becomes stronger the more indirect the children’s means of relating to the animal become. Lewis’s human characters can only relate to the symbolic animal, not the real one. While Sky Hawk, on the one hand, is unsettingly anthropocentric and negates direct access to the animal, the story also encourages to dare a metaphoric approach to animals.
Plants in Children's and Young Adult Literature
Humanities
Richard Adams's talking animal story The Plague Dogs (1978), with its deeply genre-atypical mode ... more Richard Adams's talking animal story The Plague Dogs (1978), with its deeply genre-atypical mode of narration, offers a multiplicity of avenues to explore the literary animal as animal. The story draws much of its power from the psychological complexity and related unreliability of both canine narrators, two research lab escapees gone feral. Both the terrier Snitter and the black mongrel Rowf are mentally ill and experience a highly subjective, part-fantastic world. In episodes of zero focalization, a sarcastic voice comments on the plot from the off, aggressively attacking a thoroughly anthropocentric superstructure the protagonists themselves are oblivious of, and presenting all that is normally constructed as "rational" in the implied reader's world as a carnivalesque farce. Combining these equally unreliable narratives, The Plague Dogs creates a unique mixture of what Phelan (2007) calls "estranging" and "bonding" unreliability and brings to light the devastating consequences of anthropocentrism. The Plague Dogs not only defamiliarizes a genre usually committed to conventional means of storytelling, but the dominant Western conception of the status of animals in the world, showing that once we start to read the animal as animal, this sets into motion an avalanche of other concepts in need of re-reading, among them the very ones making up the fundamental pillars of Western societies' anthropocentric self-conception.
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2021
In Gill Lewis’s debut novel, Sky Hawk (2011) two children befriend a wounded osprey, starting a c... more In Gill Lewis’s debut novel, Sky Hawk (2011) two children befriend a wounded osprey, starting a chain reaction that ultimately saves a Ghambian girl. However, the animal itself becomes increasingly decorporalized in the process. As this article argues, the human-animal bond in Sky Hawk becomes stronger the more indirect the children’s means of relating to the animal become. Lewis’s human characters can only relate to the symbolic animal, not the real one. While Sky Hawk, on the one hand, is unsettingly anthropocentric and negates direct access to the animal, the story also encourages to dare a metaphoric approach to animals.
Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, 2020
Gothic Animals - Uncanny Otherness and the Animal With-Out, 2020
British author Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs (1977) challenges far more than vivisection and ot... more British author Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs (1977) challenges far more than vivisection and other forms of cruelty to animals. This anthology chapter, approaching Adams’s talking dog story through the lens of the Gothic, argues that The Plague Dogs puts into question the very foundation of the dualist distinctions employed to separate Self from Other, Human from Animal, and, most centrally, Within from Without. In a labyrinth-like network of uncanny elements that turn The Plague Dogs into a nightmarish allegory of Otherness itself, the borders of Within and Without are entirely obliterated, leaving the reader without the slightest anchoring point to makes sense of the story in any conventional way. There is only one thing that ties together all Gothic elements in the story: an underlying conviction that the animal that really matters is the real animal, the ‘animal without’, and that humans averted their gaze from this animal for far too long – and at their own peril.
Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade, 2019
Anglistik, 2019
Stories of humans and their companion animals have fascinated the reading public for centuries. W... more Stories of humans and their companion animals have fascinated the reading public for centuries. While in the 20th century most such stories implicitly served to reinforce anthropocentric structures and humanist philosophies, this paper argues that British companion animal stories of the 21st century often narrate distinctively different stories that set out a posthuman, rather than a humanist agenda. Instead of ever-loyal dogs and plucky cats, the animal protagonists the reader encounters frequently are uncanny ones: secretly talking genetically modified creatures, family pets with (often distinctively dark) agendas of their own, cats with transformative powers or dogs whose apparently innocent actions turn out to be inspired by ideologies the human characters cannot fathom. Uncanny companion animal characters such as Prince, the dog hero of Matt Haig’s The Last Family in England (2004), or Roger, the supernatural cat of Lynn Truss’s horror satire Cat out of Hell (2014) are precariously posed on the boundaries between human and non-human, nature and culture, and often – through the intervention of genetic engineering and bio-technology – nature and technology as well. Such companion animal stories frequently transgress boundaries: not only do the pets forcefully undermine the animal-human border and negate any form of dualist self/other or nature/culture distinction; companion animal narratives also blur genre distinctions. The intellect, and often language, of the uncanny pet introduces fantastic elements into what at a first glance appear to be realistic worlds, and as talking animals in particular most commonly inhabit children’s literature, but in 21st century stories frequently appear in adult fiction as well, target groups too remain tantalizingly undefined. In its literary conspecies and other pets, Derrida’s cat has been joined by a multitude of other voices of the non-human that, as I will argue, inhabit a posthuman narrative spaces and urge for a redefinition not only of the human / companion animal relationship, but of the very idea of ‘humanness’.
Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen, and In-Between, 2018
Child and young adult characters in popular British children’s fiction often develop their own ag... more Child and young adult characters in popular British children’s fiction often develop their own agency in interaction with an animal protagonist or sidekick with whom they team up against a corrupt, materialist adult world. Both child and animal are united by the crushing experience that their voices tend to be ignored by adult humans.This chapter approaches representations of children’s and young adults’ agency from an ecocritical point of view, arguing that such representations of agency draw on a Romantic image of the child as in unison with nature. Many popular children’s stories construct children’s agency as emanating from a friction in a stark nature/culture divide which the child protagonists alone are able to transgress. Drawing power and self-confidence from transgressing such boundaries, the child characters discover and develop their own capacities of agency in interconnection with animals. In consequence, they discover forms of agency inaccessible to adults that might even potentially disrupt hegemonic structures. The animals’ functions in these stories are diverse: some are passive recipients of direly-needed human help, others serve as catalysts only, remaining unaffected by the agency they trigger in the child. Other develop their own agency, child and animal standing united against an ‘unnatural’ adult realm. Other stories again construct ‘animality’ in the child, using animal transformation as trigger to unleash the child’s power of agency. All these stories construct their representations of children from intersecting the human with the non-human, the natural with the cultural, and the self with the other, presenting as most central to the formation of children’s and young adults’ agency the undefined interim spaces at which these dualist categories reach their limits.
Animal stories, especially anthropomorphic ones, are chronically underrepresented in scholarship.... more Animal stories, especially anthropomorphic ones, are chronically underrepresented in scholarship. Traditional literary criticism disregards them as a minor side-branch of children’s fiction in which metaphoric animals idle through Arcadian worlds, teaching the child reader lessons on the beauties of nature and the importance of conservation. Yet, when interlinking a traditional critical approach with Ecofeminism, one can see that these stories deserve far closer attention than they usually get. Using animal protagonists as a shield, authors can write in a protective sand-box, hiding patriarchal ideologies behind biologistic arguments and re-shaping ‘the natural’ to their convenience. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is notorious for its all-male world, and although female characters tend to ‘invade’ the genre in the late 20th and early 21st century, they do so at their own peril, often becoming an integral part of patriarchal structures. Female characters are generally of secondary importance, “breeding stock” as the narrator in Richard Adams’s Watership Down pointedly remarks. Reinforcing traditional gender rules, females often appear as the possession of the males, obediently stay at home and rear the young, excluded from culture, decision-making, and, of course, leadership. True to the woman/nature analogy their naïve innocence renders them closer to nature, and simultaneously forces them into utterly passive positions. Often democratic or matriarchal structures are overthrown in order to re-establish a semi-feudal patriarchal hierarchy. Presenting all the above-mentioned structures as ‘natural’ and therefore right, the genre serves as a retreat for patriarchal myths. Traditional literary criticism lacks the methodology to address these issues. Hence, Ecofeminism, in connection with Ecocriticism and Animal Studies, can offer a unique contribution to the study of children’s animal stories and help to dismantle the invisibility cloak ‘the natural’ throws over patriarchal ideologies.
Humans and Animals - Intersecting Lives and Worlds, 2019
"Relationships between humans and non-human animals are deeply complex and often governed by tens... more "Relationships between humans and non-human animals are deeply complex and often governed by tensions and paradoxes. Both wild and domestic, metaphorical and real, assistants and adversaries, animals effortlessly bridge cultural and natural spaces and form an integral part of human lives. This volume addresses several currently debated topics in science and culture: How shall we rethink, rebuild and re-envision our relationships with other animals? How do we construct ideas of 'the animal'? How can we negotiate animal interests against our own? In which ways do we make sense - and use - of animals in 'human' cultural spaces? Addressing the non-human animal from the standpoint of various social and cultural constructions from a global and multidisciplinary perspective, the chapters within this volume do not seek to answer these questions, but rather to draw attention to the complexity of the underlying issues and the manifold dimensions of the animal-human bond."
https://brill.com/view/title/38396?lang
Stories about talking animals enjoy an exceptional popularity in English literature and in childr... more Stories about talking animals enjoy an exceptional popularity in English literature and in children's fiction in particular. Animal stories of the final years of the twentieth and the first years of the twenty-first century often fuse motifs of nature with motifs of religion, and in doing so harness religious discourse to an environmental agenda. Examining a corpus of more than two dozen late twentieth century and early twenty-first century talking-animal stories, Anja Höing traces the manifold connections between nature and religion in talking-animal stories. These connections range from descriptions of natural spaces as mystical or spiritual to depictions of animate nature as a genuine deity, and they often include re-conceptualisations of religious motifs in environmental dimensions. Exploring motifs such as the saviour or the devil, the author argues that talking-animal stories construct 'Nature' as a quasi-religious entity and the animal protagonist as an environmental role model. Establishing links between literary texts and current conceptions of ecosystems as well as socio-cultural debates on the human place in nature, this study proposes that many animal stories simultaneously deconstruct and reinforce a human/nature dualism and in doing so reflect the very ideology they seek to challenge.
Many thanks to WVT for their friendly permission to share the Introduction on Academia.edu