Literary Autozoographies - Narrating Animal Life from a First-Person Perspective (original) (raw)
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Recovering and Reconstructing Animal Selves in Literary Autozoographies
Animal Biography: Re-framing Animal Lives, ed. André Krebber and Mieke Roscher, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
The chapter discusses animal autobiographies as ‘literary autozoographies’ and demonstrates how these stories engage with animal selves, while reflecting, negotiating and affecting zoological knowledge concerning specific animal species. Outlining the functions of literary autozoographies, the chapter sketches context-sensitive, zoopoetical approaches to taking animal autobiographies as a starting point to reconstruct animal lives and selves. The German Romantic E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 'The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr' (1819/21) is taken as a case in point to show not only how the text negotiates and redefines natural history’s meaning and consideration of cats’ selves but also how literary autozoographies may incorporate extra-textual human-animal relationships, drawing out attention to traces and acknowledgments of animal selves.
Literary Animal Studies in 2012: Where We Are, Where We Are Going
Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 2012
Literary Animal Studies began, as did most of the disciplines that contribute to Animal Studies and Human-Animal Studies, in the 1980s. That era of raised social-consciousness opened academic disciplines to many new perspectives. The unique contribution Animal Studies made was to suggest that other-than-human perspectives not only existed but could expand and enhance human consciousness beyond what since the Middle Ages had been believed to be the impermeable boundary between human and animal. Increased knowledge and awareness of nonhuman possibility came and continues to come from virtually every existing academic discipline. What Literary Animal Studies contributes to the mix is the news that the arts, their roots in humans' earliest response to the world and those they shared it with, still retain the power to rekindle that deep time when the boundary between human and animal was permeable, when humans knew they were one among many other animals, and anthropocentrism had not yet emerged to deny that kinship.
Introduction: Biographies, Animals and Individuality
Animal Biography: Re-framing Animal Lives, 2018
The chapter introduces biographical research within historical, cultural and literary studies as an approach to recovering the individuality of animals. As a genre, biography depends as much on disciplinary and cultural contexts and the willingness to subscribe agency to the biographical subject as on the willingness to accept the constructedness of narratives. The chapter sketches out prior attempts to create animal biographies of individuals as well as groups of animals and presents new theoretical perspectives that promise to be fruitful in generating a view of animals as agents while at the same time problematizing the representational form of the biography. As such, the writing of animal biographies comes into view as an interdisciplinary effort that re-writes animal lives through their shared relationships with humans.
Animal Biography: Re-framing Animal Lives
Animal Biography: Re-framing Animal Lives, 2018
While historiography is dominated by attempts that try to standardize and de-individualize the behavior of animals, history proves to be littered with records of the exceptional lives of unusual animals. This book introduces animal biography as an approach to the re-framing of animals as both objects of knowledge as well as subjects of individual lives. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective and bringing together scholars from, among others, literary, historical and cultural studies, the texts collected in this volume seek to refine animal biography as a research method and framework to studying, capturing, representing and acknowledging animal others as individuals. From Heini Hediger's biting monitor, Hachikō and Murr to celluloid ape Caesar and the mourning of Topsy's gruesome death, the authors discuss how animal biographies are discovered and explored through connections with humans that can be traced in archives, ethological fieldwork and novels, and probe the means of constructing animal biographies from taxidermy to film, literature and social media. Thus, they invite deeper conversations with socio-political and cultural contexts that allow animal biographies to provide narratives that reach beyond individual life stories, while experimenting with particular forms of animal biographies that might trigger animal activism and concerns for animal well-being, spur historical interest and enrich the literary imagination.
Fictional Menageries: Writing Animals in the Early Twenty-First Century
Word and Text, 2021
In 'On the Animal Turn', Harriet Ritvo notes that though 'learned attention to animals is far from new', stretching indeed as far back as Aristotle's Historia Animalium, 'nevertheless, during the last several decades, animals have emerged as a more frequent focus on scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, as quantified in published books and articles, conference presentations, new societies, and new journals.' 1 Before delving into Timothy C. Baker's Writing Animals, itself part of one of a scholarly series to have emerged in this budding field (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature), it is useful to note a few things about the circumstances attending the field's rise. As its name clearly suggests, literary animal studies is a subset within the array of subfields within so-called 'critical animal studies', which also include ecology, philosophy, ethics, history, cognition and language studies, but also, and equally importantly, social justice and activist movements, from ones focused on preservation of habitats, the humane treatment of animals and the ban on industrial and medical exploitation and cruelty to positive animal rights in freedom and dignity, to vegetarianism and veganism. Institutionally, as we learn from the accounts of Nik Taylor and Richard Twine, as well as Anthony J. Nocella II et al., critical animal studies grew out of nineteenth-century interventions like Henry Salt's Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Moral Progress of 1894 and the post WW2 confluence between animal rights and other social justice movements as reflected in Peter Singer's foundational Animal Liberation of 1975, until they led to the foundation of the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs in 2001 and the Institute for Critical Animal Studies in 2007. The affiliated Journal for Critical Animal Studies was re-launched in the same year as a follow-up to its previous incarnation, the Animal Liberation Philosophy and
Review article The biographies of animal celebrities published by the historians John Simons and Eric Baratay aim to place animals in and of themselves at the center of academic narratives. Both excavate the lived experiences concealed behind official discourses and collective representations, notably by relying on cross-fertilization with ethological research. They unveil the ways in which information was reshaped in order to portray animal celebrities as benevolent members of human-animal communities, and thereby shed light on the mechanics of animal commodification. The close examination of a few individual animal trajectories enlightens the condition of many historical animals living under human tutelage in the 19th and early 20th century and highlights long-term historical evolutions, such as the succession of animal cultures and generations largely determined by human actions.
Unlocking the Voices of the Nonhuman: A Hermeneutic Analysis of Eighteenth-Century Animalographies
Transylvanian Review, 2023
Voicing the literary animal is a task of immense responsibility. Exploring two eighteenth-century novels, namely The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1784) and Biography of a Spaniel (1797), this essay aims to analyze the use of nonhuman narrators and their surfacing insights into humananimal relationality. By employing Hanna Meretoja’s concept of “narrative hermeneutics” and Anat Pick’s “creaturely poetics,” the analysis questions the ways in which animalographies empower the voices and agency of nonhuman entities in literature and shift the narrative away from a human-centric one to a more inclusive, multispecies one. To this end, the literary animal’s employment and portrayal delimitates ethical spheres of interaction within the narrative, reassessing the hierarchical model constructed by anthropocentrism and challenging the traditional, dominant narrative that prioritizes human experience and perception.
Literary Autozoographies: Contextualizing Species Life in German Animal Autobiography
What does it mean to take animal autobiography seriously and how can we account for the representation of life-narrating animals? The article investigates animal autobiographies as 'literary autozoographies', drawing attention to both the generic contexts and the epistemological premises of these texts. Adopting a double-bind approach stemming from autobiographical research as well as cultural animal studies, the article focuses on early nineteenth-century equine autozoographies from the German-speaking tradition. These texts are discussed exemplarily in relation to the parameters of fictional autobiographies, before they are contextualized with historical discourses regarding horses in natural history and so-called 'horse-science'. Due to the fact that the poetics and aesthetics of the genre are modeled on the templates of factual autobiographies, the article argues that literary autozoographies can be read as fictional autobiographies as well as meta-auto/biographical discourse undermining autobiographical conventions. Furthermore, it shows that literary autozoography and zoology share a common historical and ideological epistemology accounting for the representation of animals in both fields. Literary autozoographies thus participate in the negotiation and production of species-specific knowledge. Reading Life of the Mecklenburg Mare Amante (1804), Life of a Job Horse (1807) and Life of a Worn-Out Hack (1819) alongside equine-centric discourses around 1800, the article demonstrates in what ways these texts can be regarded as part of a regime of knowledge attributing emotions and cognitive capacities to horses, while simultaneously arguing for humane treatment on the basis of interspecies homologies.