What Is Zoopoetics?: Texts, Bodies, Entanglement (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature)

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. Front Matter ....Pages i-xi Introduction: What Is Zoopoetics? (Kári Driscoll, Eva Hoffmann)....Pages 1-13 Prelude: I Observe with My Pen (Marcel Beyer)....Pages 15-23 Front Matter ....Pages 25-25 Hunting Narratives: Capturing the Lives of Animals (Nicolas Picard)....Pages 27-44 “You Cannot Escape Your Moles”: The Becoming-Animal of Günter Eich’s Late Literary Texts (Belinda Kleinhans)....Pages 45-62 The Grammar of Zoopoetics: Human and Canine Language Play (Joela Jacobs)....Pages 63-79 “‘Sire,’ says the fox”: The Zoopoetics and Zoopolitics of the Fable in Kleist’s “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts whilst Speaking” (Sebastian Schönbeck)....Pages 81-100 Front Matter ....Pages 101-101 The Light That Therefore I Give (to): Paleonymy and Animal Supplementarity in Clarice Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark (Rodolfo Piskorski)....Pages 103-128 “Constituents of a Chaos”: Whale Bodies and the Zoopoetics of Moby-Dick (Michaela Castellanos)....Pages 129-147 Queering the Interspecies Encounter: Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear (Eva Hoffmann)....Pages 149-165 Myth, Absence, Haunting: Toward a Zoopoetics of Extinction (Paul Sheehan)....Pages 167-190 Front Matter ....Pages 191-191 Spinning Theory: Three Figures of Arachnopoetics (Matthias Preuss)....Pages 193-212 Impersonal Love: Nightwood’s Poetics of Mournful Entanglement (Peter J. Meedom)....Pages 213-233 Between Encounter and Release: Animal Presences in Two Contemporary American Poems (Ann Marie Thornburg)....Pages 235-251 Heading South into Town: ipipipipipipip, ah yeah, um, we’re gonna, yeah,ip (Catherine Clover)....Pages 253-270 Coda: Speaking, Reading, Writing (Marcel Beyer)....Pages 271-274 Back Matter ....Pages 275-284 Annotation This work 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 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