Following the Animal

Following the Animal
Author: Ann-Sofie Lönngren
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2015-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1443882461

Literary transformations from human to animal have occurred in myths, folklore, fairy tales and narratives from all over the world since ancient times, and have always provided a narrative space for depictions of power, agency, and the radical nature of change. In Following the Animal, these transformations are analysed with regards to their use in modern literature from northern-most Europe, with specific attention being paid to the insights they provide regarding the human-animal relationship, both generally in the industrialized West, and against the background of more specific circumstances in the Nordic area. In three analytic chapters, focusing respectively on Swedish author August Strindberg’s novel Tschandala (1887), Finnish author Aino Kallas’s novel The Wolf’s Bride (1928), and Danish author Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen’s short story “The Monkey” (1934), along with discussions of a range of other authors and texts, the reader is introduced to several traditions of literary production that both connect to, and differ from, Anglophone and other literature in fascinating ways. In addition to the insights it provides concerning the uses of human-animal transformations in modern Nordic literature, and their significance in relation to “the question of the animal”, Following the Animal also offers literary scholars and students alike a series of useable and transferable strategies for approaching texts from a “more-than-anthropocentric”, human-animal studies perspective. In phrasing and employing the interpretational method of “following the animal” over the text’s surface, up metaphorical elevations, down material wormholes, and in constant dialogue with previous research, this book contributes greatly to both human-animal literary studies specifically, and to the field of literary scholarship generally, in both an international and northern-European context.

Animal Alterity

Animal Alterity
Author: Sherryl Vint
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1846312345

Animal Alterity uses readings of science fiction texts to explore how animals are central to our perception of humanity. Arguing that the academic field of animal studies and the popular genre of science fiction share a number a critical concerns, Sherryl Vint expresses an urgent need to reconsider the human-animal boundary in a world of genetic engineering, factory farming, species extinctions, and increasing evidence of animal intelligence, emotions, and tool use. Mapping the complex terrain of human relations with non-human animals, this book offers an important intervention into the contentious ongoing discussions of the post-human.

Urban Animals

Urban Animals
Author: Tora Holmberg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2015-03-27
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1317564839

The city includes opportunities as well as constraints for humans and other animals alike. Urban animals are often subjected to complaints; they transgress geographical, legal as and cultural ordering systems, while roaming the city in what is often perceived as uncontrolled ways. But they are also objects of care, conservation practices and bio-political interventions. What then, are the "more-than-human" experiences of living in a city? What does it mean to consider spatial formations and urban politics from the perspective of human/animal relations? This book draws on a number of case studies to explore urban controversies around human/animal relations, in particular companion animals: free ranging dogs, homeless and feral cats, urban animal hoarding and "crazy cat ladies". The book explores ‘zoocities’, the theoretical framework in which animal studies meet urban studies, resulting in a reframing of urban relations and space. Through the expansion of urban theories beyond the human, and the resuscitation of sociological theories through animal studies literature, the book seeks to uncover the phenomenon of ‘humanimal crowding’, both as threats to be policed, and as potentially subversive. In this book, a number of urban controversies and crowding technologies are analysed, finally pointing at alternative modes of trans-species urban politics through the promises of humanimal crowding - of proximity and collective agency. The exclusion of animals may be an urban ideology, aiming at social order, but close attention to the level of practice reveals a much more diverse, disordered, and perhaps disturbing experience.

Postmodern Animal

Postmodern Animal
Author: Steve Baker
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2000-03
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781861890603

In The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker explores how animal imagery has been used in modern and contemporary art and performance, and in postmodern philosophy and literature, to suggest and shape ideas about identity and creativity. Baker cogently analyses the work of such European and American artists as Olly and Suzi, Mark Dion, Paula Rego and Sue Coe, at the same time looking critically at the constructions, performances and installations of Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys and other significant late twentieth-century artists. Baker's book draws parallels between the animal's place in postmodern art and poststructuralist theory, drawing on works as diverse as Jacques Derrida's recent analysis of the role of animals in philosophical thought and Julian Barnes's best-selling Flaubert's Parrot.

Animal Spaces, Beastly Places

Animal Spaces, Beastly Places
Author: Chris Philo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2004-08-02
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1134640110

Animal Spaces, Beastly Places examines how animals interact and relate with people in different ways. Using a comprehensive range of examples, which include feral cats and wild wolves, to domestic animals and intensively farmed cattle, the contributors explore the complex relations in which humans and non-human animals are mixed together. Our emotions involving animals range from those of love and compassion to untold cruelty, force, violence and power. As humans we have placed different animals into different categories, according to some notion of species, usefulness, domesticity or wildness. As a result of these varying and often contested orderings, animals are assigned to particular places and spaces. Animal Spaces, Beastly Places shows us that there are many exceptions and variations on the spatiality of human-animal spatial orderings, within and across cultures, and over time. It develops new ways of thinking about human animal interactions and encourages us to find better ways for humans and animals to live together.

Representing Animals

Representing Animals
Author: Nigel Rothfels
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2002-11-28
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780253215512

There are complex & often surprising connections between our imagining of animals & our cultural environment. Topics discussed in this collection include fox hunting, pet cloning, animatronic characters & how we displace our fear of aging onto our dogs.

The Animal Gaze

The Animal Gaze
Author: Wendy Woodward
Publisher:
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN:

Many humans do not regard animals as complex beings. This title brings together Animal Studies, Ethics, Literary Studies and African traditional thought, including shamanism, in a way that compels the reader to think differently about nonhuman animals and human relationships with them.

Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents

Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents
Author: Gary Steiner
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2005-11-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0822970988

Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents is the first-ever comprehensive examination of views of animals in the history of Western philosophy, from Homeric Greece to the twentieth century. In recent decades, increased interest in this area has been accompanied by scholars' willingness to conceive of animal experience in terms of human mental capacities: consciousness, self-awareness, intention, deliberation, and in some instances, at least limited moral agency. This conception has been facilitated by a shift from behavioral to cognitive ethology (the science of animal behavior), and by attempts to affirm the essential similarities between the psychophysical makeup of human beings and animals. Gary Steiner sketches the terms of the current debates about animals and relates these to their historical antecedents, focusing on both the dominant anthropocentric voices and those recurring voices that instead assert a fundamental kinship relation between human beings and animals. He concludes with a discussion of the problem of balancing the need to recognize a human indebtedness to animals and the natural world with the need to preserve a sense of the uniqueness and dignity of the human individual.