Animal Theory

This book offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric literary and cultural texts. The contributors put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by seriously considering the animal presence in texts. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied theoretically informed interdisciplinary perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts that cut across geographical and period boundaries and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the “animal turn” in the field of literary and cultural studies, this book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers fresh perspectives on Posthumanist theory, inviting readers to revisit those criteria that created species’ difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book constitutes a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed and explore a range of dynamic, captivating, and highly relevant topics.

By examining two exemplary cases, this paper addresses the contemporary phenomenon of artistic collaborations between human and non-human animals, which is referred to as interspecies art. Interspecies art has become increasingly significant since the beginning of the twenty-first century and excels at challenging binary oppositions by crediting animals’ creative abilities. Located within the field of human-animal studies, this article combines art historical methods with agency concepts derived from praxeology and action theory. The innovative approach of connecting these ideas of animal agency with interspecies art provides the framework to analyse Aaron Angell’s Gallery Peacetime inhabited by axolotls and CMUK, an interspecies collective consisting of humans and parrots. In order to make the animals’ participation visible as well as to provide a deeper understanding of interspecies art, these specific human-animal relations are examined using Lisa Jevbratt’s and Jessica Ullrich’s criteria for interspecies art and Mieke Roscher’s concepts of entangled and relational agency. This analysis is complemented by a field study and proves to be fertile for revealing the animals’ strong involvement in the artworks as well as beyond the art context.
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Vorliegend werden zwei Agency-Konzepte nach der Historikerin Mieke Roscher in Fallbeispielen aus dem Kunstkontext erprobt und auf Aaron Angell's "Gallery Peacetime" und das Interspezies-Kollaborativ CMUK angewendet.

This review reflects on animal history as a subfield of the discipline of history and presents its main arguments and future tasks. Its main goal is to identify the new research prospects and potentials proposed by the book edited by Susan Nance, The Historical Animal. These include such topics as the problem of " the animal's point of view, " animal agency (animals understood as " historical " agents and actors), the problem of identifying traces of animal actions in " anthropocentric " archives and searching for new historical sources (including animals' testimonies). It also explores methodological difficulties, especially with the idea of the historicization of animals and the possible merger of the humanities and social sciences with the natural and life sciences. The review considers how studying animals forces scholars to rethink to its foundations history as a discipline. It claims that the most progressive proposals are coming from scholars (many of whom are historians) who advocate radical interdisciplinarity. The authors are not only interested in merging history with specific sciences (such as animal psychology, ecology, ethology, evolutionary biology, and zoology), but also question basic assumptions of the discipline: the epistemic authority claimed by historians for building knowledge of the past as well as the human epistemic authority for creating such knowledge. In this context several questions emerge: can we achieve " interspecies competence " (Erica Fudge's term) for creating a multispe-cies knowledge of the past? Can research on animals' perception of change help us to develop nonhistorical approaches to the past? Can we imagine accounts of the past based on multispecies co-authorship?

In the framework of contemporary ecocritical and posthumanist theories, this comparative analysis of works by Paolo Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee focuses on the conflictual relationship of proximity and differentiation at stake in the human-animal distinction in a post-Darwinian context dominated by the rise of experimental sciences. A discussion of vivisection and animal taming prompted by anthropocentric works as Mantegazza's _Fisiologia del dolore_ and _Upilio Faimali_ in tension with pro-animal essays by Ouida and Vernon Lee shows how the animal, caught between pure inert materiality and idealization, emerges as an intrinsic lack that the human fills with contending rational, utilitarian, moral, and affective motivations.

Publicado en 2015, De ganados y de hombres de la brasilera Ana Paula Maia (Nova Iguaçu, 1977) nos coloca ante el matadero “Touro do Milo” y un clima social en descomposición. Desde la vasta tradición de literatura brasilera y en la que a Paula Maia se la vincula con Rubem Fonseca y Nelson Rodrigues, De ganados y de hombres se inserta, no sin cierta fricción, en la larga estirpe de relatos contemporáneos sobre mataderos y vacas

Miller, in his " Critic as Host, " defines the word parasite as " a curious system of thought, or of language, or of social organization (in fact all three at once " (422). He expounds upon the various meanings of " parasite " in an attempt to find its place in the text: " Parastical " —the word is an interesting one. Its suggests the image of " the obvious or univocal reading " as the mighty, masculine oaks or ash, rooted in the solid ground, endangered by the insidious twining around it of ivy, English or maybe poison, somehow feminine, secondary, defective, or dependent, a clinging vine, able to live in no other way but by drawing the life sap of its host, cutting off its light and air. (440) This type of simultaneous living does not necessarily undermine the standard interpretation, but the narrative itself is perforated, snaked through by the living of a very active parasite. This type of narrative parasite plays a very self-conscious role in the forward movement of the plot. This " [depended, clinging vine] " moves the plot, controls its ingestion. The narrative parasite controls the way a text is digested by the reader, it acts as the capsule by which the main narrative is delivered. In recent studies of animal theory, the narrative proves itself often unwilling to yield its textual dog-ness. The animal must be coaxed out, forced into a confrontation/stand off with the narrative. It often reveals the underlying alterity that is so habitually muted, meant to infect the text on a subconscious, substructural level. Like the animal that emerges out of Coetzee's Disgrace, the parasitic event of alterity relies on the larger context, can only exist within the larger framework of the human Disgrace. The animal within the narrative is admittedly dependent on the textual body of the text. However, the textual event is symbiotic—the