Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Popular Culture

289 Pages·2005·32.99 MB·English

by  Mary Sanders Pollock

FIGURING ANIMALS
FIGURING ANIMALS: EssAYs
ON ANIMAL IMAGES IN ART,
LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY,
AND PoPULAR CuLTURE
Mary Sanders Pollock
and
Catherine Rainwater
* FIGURING ANIMALS
© Mary S. Pollock and Catherine Rainwater, 2005.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2005 by
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ISBN 978-1-4039-6512-7 ISBN 978-1-137-09411-7 (eBook)
DOI10.1007/978-1-137-09411-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Figuring animals : essays on animal images in art, literature, philosophy, and
popular culture. I edited by Mary S. Pollock and Catherine Rainwater.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
1. Human-animal relationships. 2.Animals in art. 3.Animals in literature.
4.Animals (Philosophy) I. Pollock, Mary Sanders, 1948-11. Rainwater, Catherine,
1953-
QL85.F54 2004
590-dc22 2004040562
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: january 2005
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Transferred to Digital Printing 2011
For Rory and Kodi
and
In memory ofG ene Dabney
(I9JI-2002)
CoNTENTS
Contributors rx
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction I
Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater
Part I The Social Animal 19
I. Lost Dog, or, Levinas Faces the Animal 21
H. Peter Steeves
2. Ursus Americanus: The Idea of a Bear 37
Melanie Fox
3· Digging and Leveling in Adam's Garden: Women and
the International Cat Fancy 49
Susan E. Jones
Part II The Observed and the Observer 63
4· Animal Testimony in Renaissance Art: Angelic
and Other Supernatural Visitations 65
William J Scheick
5· Strange Yet "Familiar": Cats and Birds in Remedios
Varo's Artistic Universe 81
Nancy liOsburg
6. Who's Looking? The Animal Gaze in the Fiction of
Brigitte Kronauer and Clarice Lispector 99
Jutta Ittner
Part III Art and Science n9
7· Burning Out the Animal: The Failure of Enlightenment
Purification in H. G. Wells's The Island ofD r. Moreau 121
Carrie Rohman
viii - Contents
8. Ouida's Rhetoric of Empathy: A Case Study in
Victorian Anti-Vivisection Narrative 135
Mary Sanders Pollock
Part IV Difference and Desire 161
9· The Black Stallion in Print and Film 163
Lindsay McLean Addison
10. "Who are the Bandar-log?" Questioning Animals in
Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli Stories and Ursula Le Guin's
"Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" 177
Christopher Powici
n. To the Other: The Animal and Desire in Michael
Field's Whym Chow: Flame ofL ove 195
David Banash
12. "Identifying with the Animals": Language,
Subjectivity, and the Animal Politics of Margaret
Atwood's Surfacing 207
Robert McKay
Part V Theories of the Other 229
13. Sensory Experience as Consciousness in Literary
Representations ofA nimal Minds 231
Julie A. Smith
14. Human-Animal Affiliation in Modern Popular Film 247
TimGadd
15. Who May Speak for the Animals? Deep Ecology in Linda
Hogan's Power and A. A. Carr's Eye Killers 261
Catherine Rainwater
Index 281
CoNTRIBUTORs
Lindsay McLean Addison was born and raised in Naples, Florida, and
attended college at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, where she
majored in English and minored in biology.
David Banash is a graduate student at the University of Iowa.
Melanie Dylan Fox is an award-winning creative nonfiction writer. Her
work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. In addition
to teaching, she has worked as a freelance writer and as a writing con
sultant on several international projects. She is currently at work on a non
fiction book that explores television media fandom, and a collection of
essays focused on the history and ecology of human interaction with the
natural world in Sequoia National Park, California, where she lived and
worked for five seasons. For now, she makes her home in western
Pennsylvania.
Tim Gadd is primarily interested in the depiction of animals and
animal/human hybrids. He is presently completing his PhD at The
University of Tasmania, titled Tales of the Morphing Period: Animals and
Anthropomorphism in Modern Popular Texts. His fiction work has been pub
lished in the United States, and he has written and produced numerous
radio plays and serials in Australia.
Jutta Ittner received her PhD from Hamburg University, Germany. She
has been teaching German at CWRU in Cleveland since 1992, currently
in the position as assistant professor. Before that she taught at Oberlin
College and in Munich. She has worked on exile literature, acculturation
and foreign language acquisition, and published a comprehensive intellec
tual biography on the exile writer Martin Gumpert (Bielefeld: Aisthesis,
1998). Her main area of research is German contemporary women's fic
tion, especially Brigitte Kronauer's, and comparative literary studies with
the focus on the representation of animals.
Susan E. Jones is an Assistant Professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic
University. In addition to her academic interests, she has been intimately
acquainted with the cat fancy through showing Maine Coon cats under her
cattery name, Koonznroses.
Robert McKay completed his PhD with a dissertation called, The Literary
Representation ofP ro-animal Thought: Readings in Contemporary Fiction at the
x - Contributors
University of Sheffield in October 2003. As well as being a contributor to
Society & Animals and coorganizing the Millennia! Animals conference at
Sheffield in 2000, he is a member of the Animal Studies Group, a U.K.
based collaborative research seminar. Their book, Killing Animals will be
published in 2004.
Mary Sanders Pollock is a Professor of English at Stetson University;
DeLand, Florida. She teaches and publishes on Victorian literature,
women and gender studies, and environmental literature. She is the author
of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning: A Creative Partnership (Ashgate,
2003).
Christopher Powici gained his PhD with a dissertation entitled, The Wolf
and Literature, at the University of Stirling in Scotland, where he now
teaches English, specializing in literature and environment. He balances
academic work with writing poetry. His poetry has been published in a
variety of magazines and journals, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio.
He was awarded a writer's bursary from the Scottish Arts Council in 2002
and is first- prize winner in the 2003 BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year Awards.
Catherine Rainwater is a Professor of English at St. Edward's University
in Austin, Texas. She is the author of numerous essays published in books
and literary journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature,
Philological ~rterly, Mississippi ~rterly, Texas Studies in Literature and
Language, and others. In 1990, she was the recipient of the Norman
Foerster Prize from the Modern Language Association for her work con
cerning the American Indian novelist and poet, Louise Erdrich. Her most
recent book is Dreams ofF iery Stars: The Transformations ofN ative American
Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
Carrie Rohman completed her doctorate in twentieth-century British
literature and critical theory at Indiana University. Her dissertation is enti
tled, Stalking the Subject: Modernism, Alterity, and the ~estion oft he Animal.
She has also published recently on the discourse of animality in the work
of D. H. Lawrence. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the
University of Pittsburgh it Johnstown.
William J. Scheick, who specializes in Puritan and other Reformation
art, is the]. R. Millikan Centennial Professor at the University ofT exas at
Austin. His recent work includes "Tableaux of Authority: The Titlepages
of Sixteenth-Century Bibles" in Explorations in Renaissance Culture (2ooo),
"Renaissance Art and Puritan Heraldry'' in Studies in Puritan American
Spirituality (2001), ''An Inward Power and Authority: John Davenport's
Seditious Piety" in Religion and Literature (2001), and "Glorious
Imperfection in Heemkerck's Lukean Portraits of the Virgin" in
Konsthistorisk Tidskrift (2003).
Julie A. Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages
and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. She has
Contributors '*~ xi
published articles on early English book illustration and in animal studies,
with emphasis on representations of animal mental life. She lives with
thirteen animals of various species and is active in animal advocacy.
H. Peter Steeves is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul
University where he specializes in ethics, social/political philosophy, and
phenomenology. His books include Founding Community: A Phenomenological
Ethical Inquiry (Kluwer, 1998); Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and
Animal Life (SUNY Press, 1999); and The Things Themselves: Essays in
Applied Phenomenology (SUNY Press, forthcoming 2004). He is proud to
count many perritos vagabundos among his friends.
Nancy Vosburg is a Professor of Modern Languages at Stetson University,
DeLand, Florida. She teaches Spanish literature and culture on a regular
basis, and occasionally teaches courses in Women and Gender Studies.
Vosburg has published widely on contemporary Spanish women in exile.