Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics (original) (raw)
Related papers
Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics, 2019
"Texts, Animals, Environments. Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics" probes the multiple links between ecocriticism and animal studies, assessing the relations between animals, environments and poetics. While ecocriticism usually relies on a relational approach to explore phenomena related to the environment or ecology more broadly, animal studies tends to examine individual or species-specific aspects. As a consequence, ecocriticism concentrates on ecopoetical, animal studies on zoopoetical elements and modes of representation in literature (and the arts more generally). Bringing key concepts of ecocriticism and animal studies into dialogue, the volume explores new ways of thinking about and reading texts, animals, and environments – not as separate entities but as part of the same collective.
Coming to Terms: The Poetics of More-than-human Worlds
Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics, 2019
The chapter serves as an introduction to "Texts, Animals, Environments. Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics". It examines the concepts of "zoopoetics and "ecopoetics" and delineates the objectives of the volume. The authors of the book probe the multiple links between ecocriticism and animal studies, assessing the relations between animals, environments and poetics. While ecocriticism usually relies on a relational approach to explore phenomena related to the environment or ecology more broadly, animal studies tends to examine individual or species-specific aspects. As a consequence, ecocriticism concentrates on ecopoetical, animal studies on zoopoetical elements and modes of representation in literature (and the arts more generally). Bringing key concepts of ecocriticism and animal studies into dialogue, the volume explores new ways of thinking about and reading texts, animals, and environments – not as separate entities but as part of the same collective
“Following the Animal. Place, Space, and Literature” (peer-reviewed article)
Animal Places. Lively Cartographies of Human-Animal Relations, eds. Bull, J., Holmberg, T., Åsberg, C. London: Routledge., 2017
Which is the potential of introducing spatial perspectives at the intersection of literary interpretational theory and the field of human-animal studies? Firstly, the significance of the non-human is discussed in relation to ‘place’, poststructuralist theory, and conventional definitions of ‘literature’ in literary scholarship. The presence of certain animal species create textual threads in humanly phrased narratives, it is thus possible to define ‘literature’ according to an understanding of intertextuality as a potential that is inherent in all kinds of bodies. Secondly, the semantic effects of the conventional, symbolical organization of literary texts as a hierarchic ‘space’ – a surface and a depth – are investigated in relation to the human/animal divide. The animal figure is constantly challenging the boundaries of both of these levels; a subversive oscillation which depends on certain ways of reading in order to be visible. Such a ‘lively cartography’ interpretational reading practice is outlined in the third part of this chapter, ‘following the animal’: a multifaceted, multilevel tool to employ in the process of producing ‘more-than-anthropocentric’ meaning in literary texts.
2018
This book brings together essays dealing with the question of zoopoetics both as an object of study—i.e. texts from various traditions and periods that reflect, explicitly or implicitly, on the relationship between animality, language and representation—and as a methodological problem for animal studies, and, indeed, for literary studies more generally. What can literary animal studies tell us about literature that conventional literary studies might be blind to? How can literary studies resist the tendency to press animals into symbolic service as metaphors and allegories for the human whilst also avoiding a naïve literalism with respect to the literary animal? The volume is divided into three sections: “Texts,” which focuses on the linguistic and metaphorical dimensions of zoopoetics; “Bodies,” which is primarily concerned with mimesis and questions of embodiment, performance, and lived experience; and “Entanglement,” which focuses on interspecies encounters and the complex interplay between word and world that emerges from them. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of animal studies, area studies and comparative literature, gender studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and the broader field of posthumanism.
World-Ecological Literature and the Animal Question
TRANS, 2021
In recent years, the Marxist method of world-literary theory has given birth to world-ecological literary criticism, a practice of materialist comparativism that analyses how literary texts register the environmental crises of capitalist modernity. Although its practitioners have penned incisive essays on literary engagements with the extraction and exhaustion of resources like water, oil and cacao, there has been no work published on industrialized animal agriculture and the global expansion of meat production. This is not a simple omission, but rather a product of Marxism’s longstanding ambivalence towards animals. With this argument as the foundation of this essay, I set out to both extend and challenge the world-ecological analytic by paying attention to literary registrations of meat production across different socio-ecological regimes. I do so by turning to Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s 2016 novel, Règne animal, published in English as Animalia in 2019. I show how the novel embraces forms of literary naturalism which, by depicting farm workers and their animals as jointly expendable to the laws of profitability, registers the meatification of France across two centuries. Yet if naturalism ultimately depicts human characters who are powerless to stop predetermined natural laws, then to what extent does Animalia truly challenge the conditions of factory farming it wishes to expose? Put differently, what are the affordances and limitations of naturalist form for critically mapping factory farming?
With the formation of the interdisciplinary field 'Animal Studies,' animals are increasingly moving into the purview of literary and cultural studies. In the environmental humanities, an animal oriented perspective is beginning to establish itself as a dynamic and productive sub-field. Greg Garrard, for example, devotes an entire chapter to animals in Ecocriticism (2012). The way humans read animals shapes culture just as much as culture shapes the way we read animals (Baker in Garrard, 153). This mutually constitutive relationship makes 'animal' a central trope in environmental thinking and discourse. In this workshop, we want to take a closer look at how Ecocriticism and the theoretical and methodological concerns of Animal Studies can interact productively with each other. What links Ecocriticism and Animal Studies is the concern with the politics of representation that shape human interactions, material and discursive, with animals. The conceptual separation of the human animal from non-human animals is at the center of most mainstream environmental and philosophical thinking. In continental European thought, human exceptionalism is based on a variety of concepts, such as that of an immortal soul, existential freedom, or symbolic language. With its roots in the Enlightenment tradition, human exceptionalism still informs most scholarly practice in the humanities and underwrites even theoretical approaches that are interested in conceptualizing nonhuman forms of subjectivity, as posthumanist scholar Cary Wolfe points out in his seminal monograph Animal Rites (18). In this tradition, the ways in which humans relate to animals are predominantly shaped by a presumed hierarchy in which animals rank below humans. From the prevalent utilitarian perspective, animals are regarded primarily as a resource for human use, which finds expression in cultural practices like animal husbandry (esp. raising animals for human consumption) or the display of animals in zoos but also in the ways humans relate to animals through language. During this workshop, the linguistic, textual, and visual expressions of animal imaginaries that illustrate and comment on, and at the same time influence and shape, human-animal-relationships are at the center of our concern.
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.
2019
The thoughts of animals were written clearly on their faces as if spelled out with an alphabet. I found it difficult to understand that this language was illegible to other people. (Tawada, Memoirs 102) Giving Face In animal autobiographies, which I have conceptualized as "literary autozoographies" elsewhere (Middelhoff 2-3), animals are represented as narrators of their lives. Rhetorically, giving animals human voices is known as prosopopeia, i.e., the bestowing of "a face, the mask (prosopon-poiein) through which the dead, the absent, and collectives are supposed to have spoken" 1 (Menke 7; cf. also de Man 926-30). Surely, the extent to which human and nonhuman voices, discourses, and concerns in these texts coalesce and compete with each other depends on the form as well as the generic and historical contexts of a text performing "acts of speaking-for that cross the species boundary" (Herman 6). Literary autozoographies may import moral messages and satirize social phenomena; they may challenge a reader's perspective, produce sympathy for nonhuman beings, or argue on behalf of those considered "dumb" or "speechless." Similarly, in the history of environmentalism, "hypostasized Nature (with a capital n)" (Morton 162) or "the" environment (Moore) has been spoken for by various parties, individuals, and, of course, the authors of texts. Nature writing and ecopoetry have their non-literary counterparts in ecological agendas of politicians and banners of environmental activists. If humans are turned into proxies for oceans or "the" climate, prosopopoeia moves to the public platforms of political representation. Yet the question remains: 1 Prosopopeia gives "Toten, Abwesenden, Kollektiva, in der Fiktion ihrer Rede ein Gesicht, die Maske (prosopon-poiein), durch die sie gesprochen haben sollen" (Menke 7). All translations from the German are my own.