What Is Zoopoetics?

285 Pages·2018·3.79 MB·English

by  Kári Driscoll

What Is
Zoopoetics?
Texts, Bodies,
Entanglement

Edited by
Kári Driscoll &
Eva Hoffmann
Palgrave Studies in
Animals and Literature
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
Series Editors
Susan McHugh
English Department
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA
Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of execut-
ing an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds
of human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal pres-
ences that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, soci-
ology and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad,
cross-disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the
separation of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and
political stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we
locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the
‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of
as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may
have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of
a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption
and to animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representa-
tions of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are convention-
ally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically
human concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of inter-
disciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with
the material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embod-
ying a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of
how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than
simply illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of
animals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with refer-
ence to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods.
The series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating
related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from
theatre and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other
cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages.
Series Board:
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649
Kári Driscoll · Eva Hoffmann
Editors
What Is Zoopoetics?
Texts, Bodies, Entanglement
Editors
Kári Driscoll Eva Hoffmann
Utrecht University Whitman College
Utrecht, The Netherlands Walla Walla, WA, USA
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
ISBN 978-3-319-64415-8 ISBN 978-3-319-64416-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64416-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948707
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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C
ontents
Introduction: What Is Zoopoetics? 1
Kári Driscoll and Eva Hoffmann
Prelude: I Observe with My Pen 15
Marcel Beyer
Part I Texts
Hunting Narratives: Capturing the Lives of Animals 27
Nicolas Picard
“You Cannot Escape Your Moles”: The Becoming-Animal
of Günter Eich’s Late Literary Texts 45
Belinda Kleinhans
The Grammar of Zoopoetics: Human and Canine
Language Play 63
Joela Jacobs
v
vi CoNTENTS
“‘Sire,’ says the fox”: The Zoopoetics and Zoopolitics
of the Fable in Kleist’s “On the Gradual Production
of Thoughts whilst Speaking” 81
Sebastian Schönbeck
Part II Bodies
The Light That Therefore I Give (to): Paleonymy
and Animal Supplementarity in Clarice Lispector’s
The Apple in the Dark 103
Rodolfo Piskorski
“Constituents of a Chaos”: Whale Bodies and the
Zoopoetics of Moby-Dick 129
Michaela Castellanos
Queering the Interspecies Encounter: Yoko Tawada’s
Memoirs of a Polar Bear 149
Eva Hoffmann
Myth, Absence, Haunting: Toward a Zoopoetics
of Extinction 167
Paul Sheehan
Part III Entanglement
Spinning Theory: Three Figures of Arachnopoetics 193
Matthias Preuss
Impersonal Love: Nightwood’s Poetics of Mournful
Entanglement 213
Peter J. Meedom
CoNTENTS vii
Between Encounter and Release: Animal Presences
in Two Contemporary American Poems 235
Ann Marie Thornburg
Heading South into Town: ipipipipipipip, ah yeah,
um, we’re gonna, yeah, ip 253
Catherine Clover
Coda: Speaking, Reading, Writing 271
Marcel Beyer
Index 275
n C
otes on ontributors
Marcel Beyer is an award-winning poet, novelist, and translator based in
Dresden, Germany. Three of his novels, Spies (2000), The Karnau Tapes
(1997), and Kaltenburg (2012) have been translated into English. He is
the recipient of numerous awards, including the Kleist Prize (2014) and
the Büchner Prize (2016).
Michaela Castellanos is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at
Mid Sweden University. Her research interests lie in animal studies, the
environmental humanities, and risk studies. She is the European editor
of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, a member of
the research network Cultural and Literary Animal Studies (CLAS), and
a member the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture,
and the Environment (EASLE).
Catherine Clover is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her mul-
tidisciplinary art practice explores an expanded approach to communi-
cation through voice and language and the interplay between hearing/
listening and seeing/reading. She teaches at Swinburne University (MA
Writing, BA Media), Melbourne, and RMIT University (BDes Interior
Design), Melbourne, and holds a practice led Ph.D. (Fine Art) through
RMIT University.
Kári Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at
Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He holds a Ph.D. (2014) in
German Language and Literature from Columbia University. He
ix
x NoTES oN CoNTRIBUToRS
has published on zoopoetics in the works of Franz Kafka, Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, and Luigi Pirandello. He is the coeditor of Book Presence
in a Digital Age (Bloomsbury 2018) and, with Susanne C. Knittel, of
Memory after Humanism, a special issue of Parallax, 22, no. 4 (2017).
He is also an award-winning translator.
Eva Hoffmann is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department
of German Studies and Gender Studies at Whitman College in Walla
Walla, WA. She received her Ph.D. at the University of oregon at the
Department of German and Scandinavian, in 2017, and has a gradu-
ate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University
of oregon. She has published articles on Franz Kafka, Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, and orhan Pamuk.
Joela Jacobs is Assistant Professor of German studies at the University
of Arizona. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and works
on the intersection of German literature with animal studies, environ-
mental humanities, and Jewish studies. She has published articles on
monstrosity, multilingualism, literary censorship, biopolitics, animal
epistemology, critical plant studies, and contemporary German Jewish
identity. Her current book manuscript maps a microgenre of circa 1900
grotesque German literature that creatively animates nonhuman life-
forms to answer the question what it means to be human in the modern
world.
Belinda Kleinhans is Assistant Professor of German at Texas Tech
University. She received her Ph.D. in German from the University of
Waterloo (ontario) in 2013. Her research interests are in the areas of
biopolitics in literature, cultural and literary animal studies, literary texts,
and the philosophy of language, and issues of representation. She has
mainly published in the field of cultural animal studies.
Peter J. Meedom teaches English and Comparative Literature at the
University of oslo (Norway), where he earned his Ph.D. with a disser-
tation on the relationship between personal and impersonal life in the
works of Döblin, Jahnn, Giono, Céline, Barnes, and Woolf. He is editor
of the Scandinavian Journal of Nature Criticism, Ny Jord.
Nicolas Picard is a Ph.D. candidate in Francophone literature at the
Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III University (Joint Research Unit THALIM:
Paris III, CNRS, Ecole Normale Supérieure). His dissertation focuses on
zoopoetics in French literary prose (1896–1938).