This article offers an analysis of Alice Walker's novel The Temple of My Familiar. It critiqu... more This article offers an analysis of Alice Walker's novel The Temple of My Familiar. It critiques the claim that humans' ability to use language, regarded in this article as equivalent to one sense of the word representation, marks the essential difference of humans from animals. The argument has two stages. The first claims that the novel offers a way to bridge this supposed fundamental difference in order that representation, in a second sense of speaking or advocating for animals, can effectively occur. Importantly, the context of this is Walker's anti-oppressive politics of race and gender. It analyzes the portrayal of characters who understand their lives, the past, and their relationships with nonhuman animals by creating myths and stories, rather than via conventional written history. The second stage of the argument shows that this essentially creative understanding of worldviews other than the "norm" of western culture transcends the distance that langua...
This essay discusses two linked aspects of Brigid BrophyÕs work as a pro-animal writer of literat... more This essay discusses two linked aspects of Brigid BrophyÕs work as a pro-animal writer of literature. These are her determined usurping of the human hierarchy and prestige that permit violence toward animal life, and her concomitant reliance on the potential of literary-formal creativity to prosecute it. I trace these elements in the text that contains the majority of BrophyÕs literary-fictional writing about animals, The Adventures of God in his Search for the Black Girl (1973), discussing the short novel in the form of a conte philosophique which goes by that title and a number of short pro-animal fables that are collected with it. Drawing on archive materials, the discussion situates BrophyÕs literary practice in the context of her influential journalism, essays, artworks made with Maureen Duffy, her work in support of early animal rights authors and a recently discovered 1972 Open University interview on the topic of animal rights. A broader aim of the essay is thereby to properly recognize BrophyÕs significance in the literary history of contemporary writing that challenges anthropocentric attitudes to animals. WomenÕs writing is where one must look first for this development, in the work of key figures such as Margaret Atwood, Angela
Call for submissions to Animal Satire, an edited collection that can include scholarly as well as... more Call for submissions to Animal Satire, an edited collection that can include scholarly as well as creative work.
This chapter discusses the range of meanings of the concept of representation in the field of ani... more This chapter discusses the range of meanings of the concept of representation in the field of animal studies. It draws out the complexities of the term, discussing the term "representation" in the contexts of notions of animal minds, political philosophy and questions of aesthetics. The aim is to explain and attend to the importance for animal studies of the irresolvable tension between portrayal and advocacy that constitutes the notion of representation itself.
This essay offers an account of what I call “a vegan form of life”. Reflecting on a moment when a... more This essay offers an account of what I call “a vegan form of life”. Reflecting on a moment when a vegan meal was presented to me as “your lesbian food” I begin with a critique the concept of species, drawing on Judith Butler’s deconstruction of the sex/gender opposition. Social life, I argue, is shaped by “compulsory humanity,” a disposition in which species functions is a regulatory ideal rather than a biological essence. I work this critical stance into a positive description of being vegan by turning to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of the “form of life,” and the way his thought is developed in relation to animal ethics in the work of Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond and Cary Wolfe. My claim is that thinking of veganism as a form of life allows for making sense of the profound form of identification with others that it expresses, one which evades and challenges the very notion of being human.
This essay discusses two linked aspects of Brigid Brophy’s work as a pro-animal writer of literat... more This essay discusses two linked aspects of Brigid Brophy’s work as a pro-animal writer of literature. These are her determined usurping of the human hierarchy and prestige that permit violence toward animal life, and her concomitant reliance on the potential of literary-formal creativity to prosecute it. I trace these elements in the text that contains the majority of Brophy’s literary-fictional writing about animals, The Adventures of God in his Search for the Black Girl (1973), discussing the short novel in the form of a conte philosophique which goes by that title and a number of short pro-animal fables that are collected with it. Drawing on archive materials, the discussion situates Brophy’s literary practice in the context of her influential journalism, essays, artworks made with Maureen Duffy, her work in support of early animal rights authors and a recently discovered 1972 Open University interview on the topic of animal rights. A broader aim of the essay is thereby to properly recognize Brophy’s significance in the literary history of contemporary writing that challenges anthropocentric attitudes to animals. Women’s writing is where one must look first for this development, in the work of key figures such as Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Maureen Duffy, Patricia Highsmith, Ursula Le Guin, and Alice Walker. Yet, on the literary wing of the academic field of animal studies, which has burgeoned over the last fifteen years or so by discussing such figures, Brophy’s work has been almost entirely forgotten.
An analysis of Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris, focusing on its interest in the connections be... more An analysis of Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris, focusing on its interest in the connections between pro-animal and leftist thought.
If you are interested in finding out more about Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, or in... more If you are interested in finding out more about Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, or in proposing a volume for the series, please contact the series editors or Palgrave editors. For inquiries about content, contact the SERIES EDITORS: Susan McHugh, Professor and Chair of English at the University of New England, USA ([email protected]) Robert McKay, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, UK ([email protected]) John Miller, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK ([email protected]) For publishing queries, contact the PALGRAVE MACMILLAN EDITORS: Ben Doyle, Commissioning Editor, Literature ([email protected]) Ryan Jenkins, Editorial Assistant, Literature ([email protected])
A discussion of the concept of value in discussions of animal life drawing on the work of Karl Ma... more A discussion of the concept of value in discussions of animal life drawing on the work of Karl Marx, Hal Foster, and Cary Wolfe. This leads to an analysis of the novel The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary
This article offers an analysis of Alice Walker's novel The Temple of My Familiar. It critiques t... more This article offers an analysis of Alice Walker's novel The Temple of My Familiar. It critiques the claim that humans' ability to use language, regarded in this article as equivalent to one sense of the word representation, marks the essential difference of humans from animals. The argument has two stages. The first claims that the novel offers a way to bridge this supposed fundamental difference in order that representation, in a second sense of speaking or advocating for animals, can effectively occur. Impor tantly, the context of this is Walker's anti-oppressive politics of race and gender. It analyzes the portrayal of characters who understand their lives, the past, and their relationships with nonhuman animals by creating myths and stories, rather than via conventional written history. The second stage of the argument shows that this essentially creative understanding of worldviews other than the " norm " of western culture transcends the distance that language is said to insinuate between humans and animals. Creative, imaginative understanding allows humans to get close to animals. " Can one speak of the animal? Can one approach the animal? " (Derrida, 1997, p. 271)
An analysis of James Agee's story 'A Mother's Tale' in the context of postwar Humane Slaughter re... more An analysis of James Agee's story 'A Mother's Tale' in the context of postwar Humane Slaughter reform
An analysis of the animal politics of Atwood's novel, drawing on the work of Carol J. Adams and J... more An analysis of the animal politics of Atwood's novel, drawing on the work of Carol J. Adams and Judith Butler
The British Animal Studies Network seeks papers for its next meeting, to be held at the Universit... more The British Animal Studies Network seeks papers for its next meeting, to be held at the University of Sheffield on the theme of 'Conserving'. Please submit your title with an abstract of no more than 200 words and a brief biography (also of no more than 200 words) to [email protected]. These should be included within your email – i.e. not as attachments. The deadline for abstracts is 15 July 2016. Presentations will be 20 minutes long, and we hope to include work by individuals at different career stages. Sadly we have no money to support travel, accommodation or attendance costs.
Under the Skin is the story of Isserley, a woman who escapes a socially and ecologically ravaged ... more Under the Skin is the story of Isserley, a woman who escapes a socially and ecologically ravaged planet by working secretly in remote Scotland for an opaque corporate concern. In an astonishing reversal of species fortunes, she captures human males who are prepared underground and slaughtered as meat to be consumed by a social elite at home. Faber’s careful focalization of this story through Isserley allows for a subtle, ambiguous and counterintuitive inquiry into the nature of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. In the novel, Isserley’s antagonist is Amlis, a liberationist activist who presents classically liberal arguments for the extension of liberty to the humans. Complicating the book’s politics of species, however, the science fiction and gothic genre effects in the novel deliver a plot that commands the reader to sympathize with a protagonist who enacts murderous views about humans that are analogous to ideas that underpin human use of animals in the meat industry. It is gradually revealed that a commitment to species exceptionalism is Isserley's flawed vision of enlightenment, her protection against the social degradation that has blighted her life. Eventually, she comes to sense that subjection, alienation and bodily vulnerability align her with the human animals she kills, and she finally stops. Via the play of genre and form, then, Under the Skin offers a narrative of the political recognition of nonhuman species that exceeds significantly the established story of enlightened and reasoned recognition of their rights.
‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the gr... more ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we would die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence.’ (George Eliot, Middlemarch)
For Lauren Berlant, Eliot senses that ‘we are taught, from the time we are taught anything, […] to feel appropriately compassionate’. Compassion and coldness, she continues, are ‘two sides of a bargain that the subjects of modernity have struck with structural inequality’. I want to confront the importance of these points for animal ethics. The power of Eliot’s words lies in the imaginative intensity with which they posit unconstrained ethical attentiveness of vision and feeling while mortally precluding it. She rules out responsible feeling for ordinary human experience on the basis of the more radical impossibility of ‘hearing’ plant and animal life; yet must make sense of such experience in order to do so. I will explore the tenuous management of ethical feeling and unfeeling via the discourse of species: the notion of a morally significant difference in kind between humans and other animals. Leaving Eliot’s England for the otherworldly Scotland of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), I will discuss a scene in which an activist argues for the rejection of meat production by the novel’s protagonist on the grounds of an ethics of mercy: an ambivalent nodal point of sensibility and law, compassion and authority, subjection and agency, accountability and imperiousness, weakness and strength. The twist is that the activist and meat producer are nonhuman and the meat is human. This allows me to explore the novel’s challenge to the notion that language capacity absolutely determines species difference, rendering inconsequential those similarities that unite beings under a dual rubric of feeling: shared kinds of sentience (for example, sensitivity to pain) and affective responsiveness, such as flows of empathy and sympathy that are unconstrained by the logic of species.
This article offers an analysis of Alice Walker's novel The Temple of My Familiar. It critiqu... more This article offers an analysis of Alice Walker's novel The Temple of My Familiar. It critiques the claim that humans' ability to use language, regarded in this article as equivalent to one sense of the word representation, marks the essential difference of humans from animals. The argument has two stages. The first claims that the novel offers a way to bridge this supposed fundamental difference in order that representation, in a second sense of speaking or advocating for animals, can effectively occur. Importantly, the context of this is Walker's anti-oppressive politics of race and gender. It analyzes the portrayal of characters who understand their lives, the past, and their relationships with nonhuman animals by creating myths and stories, rather than via conventional written history. The second stage of the argument shows that this essentially creative understanding of worldviews other than the "norm" of western culture transcends the distance that langua...
This essay discusses two linked aspects of Brigid BrophyÕs work as a pro-animal writer of literat... more This essay discusses two linked aspects of Brigid BrophyÕs work as a pro-animal writer of literature. These are her determined usurping of the human hierarchy and prestige that permit violence toward animal life, and her concomitant reliance on the potential of literary-formal creativity to prosecute it. I trace these elements in the text that contains the majority of BrophyÕs literary-fictional writing about animals, The Adventures of God in his Search for the Black Girl (1973), discussing the short novel in the form of a conte philosophique which goes by that title and a number of short pro-animal fables that are collected with it. Drawing on archive materials, the discussion situates BrophyÕs literary practice in the context of her influential journalism, essays, artworks made with Maureen Duffy, her work in support of early animal rights authors and a recently discovered 1972 Open University interview on the topic of animal rights. A broader aim of the essay is thereby to properly recognize BrophyÕs significance in the literary history of contemporary writing that challenges anthropocentric attitudes to animals. WomenÕs writing is where one must look first for this development, in the work of key figures such as Margaret Atwood, Angela
Call for submissions to Animal Satire, an edited collection that can include scholarly as well as... more Call for submissions to Animal Satire, an edited collection that can include scholarly as well as creative work.
This chapter discusses the range of meanings of the concept of representation in the field of ani... more This chapter discusses the range of meanings of the concept of representation in the field of animal studies. It draws out the complexities of the term, discussing the term "representation" in the contexts of notions of animal minds, political philosophy and questions of aesthetics. The aim is to explain and attend to the importance for animal studies of the irresolvable tension between portrayal and advocacy that constitutes the notion of representation itself.
This essay offers an account of what I call “a vegan form of life”. Reflecting on a moment when a... more This essay offers an account of what I call “a vegan form of life”. Reflecting on a moment when a vegan meal was presented to me as “your lesbian food” I begin with a critique the concept of species, drawing on Judith Butler’s deconstruction of the sex/gender opposition. Social life, I argue, is shaped by “compulsory humanity,” a disposition in which species functions is a regulatory ideal rather than a biological essence. I work this critical stance into a positive description of being vegan by turning to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of the “form of life,” and the way his thought is developed in relation to animal ethics in the work of Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond and Cary Wolfe. My claim is that thinking of veganism as a form of life allows for making sense of the profound form of identification with others that it expresses, one which evades and challenges the very notion of being human.
This essay discusses two linked aspects of Brigid Brophy’s work as a pro-animal writer of literat... more This essay discusses two linked aspects of Brigid Brophy’s work as a pro-animal writer of literature. These are her determined usurping of the human hierarchy and prestige that permit violence toward animal life, and her concomitant reliance on the potential of literary-formal creativity to prosecute it. I trace these elements in the text that contains the majority of Brophy’s literary-fictional writing about animals, The Adventures of God in his Search for the Black Girl (1973), discussing the short novel in the form of a conte philosophique which goes by that title and a number of short pro-animal fables that are collected with it. Drawing on archive materials, the discussion situates Brophy’s literary practice in the context of her influential journalism, essays, artworks made with Maureen Duffy, her work in support of early animal rights authors and a recently discovered 1972 Open University interview on the topic of animal rights. A broader aim of the essay is thereby to properly recognize Brophy’s significance in the literary history of contemporary writing that challenges anthropocentric attitudes to animals. Women’s writing is where one must look first for this development, in the work of key figures such as Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Maureen Duffy, Patricia Highsmith, Ursula Le Guin, and Alice Walker. Yet, on the literary wing of the academic field of animal studies, which has burgeoned over the last fifteen years or so by discussing such figures, Brophy’s work has been almost entirely forgotten.
An analysis of Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris, focusing on its interest in the connections be... more An analysis of Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris, focusing on its interest in the connections between pro-animal and leftist thought.
If you are interested in finding out more about Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, or in... more If you are interested in finding out more about Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, or in proposing a volume for the series, please contact the series editors or Palgrave editors. For inquiries about content, contact the SERIES EDITORS: Susan McHugh, Professor and Chair of English at the University of New England, USA ([email protected]) Robert McKay, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, UK ([email protected]) John Miller, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK ([email protected]) For publishing queries, contact the PALGRAVE MACMILLAN EDITORS: Ben Doyle, Commissioning Editor, Literature ([email protected]) Ryan Jenkins, Editorial Assistant, Literature ([email protected])
A discussion of the concept of value in discussions of animal life drawing on the work of Karl Ma... more A discussion of the concept of value in discussions of animal life drawing on the work of Karl Marx, Hal Foster, and Cary Wolfe. This leads to an analysis of the novel The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary
This article offers an analysis of Alice Walker's novel The Temple of My Familiar. It critiques t... more This article offers an analysis of Alice Walker's novel The Temple of My Familiar. It critiques the claim that humans' ability to use language, regarded in this article as equivalent to one sense of the word representation, marks the essential difference of humans from animals. The argument has two stages. The first claims that the novel offers a way to bridge this supposed fundamental difference in order that representation, in a second sense of speaking or advocating for animals, can effectively occur. Impor tantly, the context of this is Walker's anti-oppressive politics of race and gender. It analyzes the portrayal of characters who understand their lives, the past, and their relationships with nonhuman animals by creating myths and stories, rather than via conventional written history. The second stage of the argument shows that this essentially creative understanding of worldviews other than the " norm " of western culture transcends the distance that language is said to insinuate between humans and animals. Creative, imaginative understanding allows humans to get close to animals. " Can one speak of the animal? Can one approach the animal? " (Derrida, 1997, p. 271)
An analysis of James Agee's story 'A Mother's Tale' in the context of postwar Humane Slaughter re... more An analysis of James Agee's story 'A Mother's Tale' in the context of postwar Humane Slaughter reform
An analysis of the animal politics of Atwood's novel, drawing on the work of Carol J. Adams and J... more An analysis of the animal politics of Atwood's novel, drawing on the work of Carol J. Adams and Judith Butler
The British Animal Studies Network seeks papers for its next meeting, to be held at the Universit... more The British Animal Studies Network seeks papers for its next meeting, to be held at the University of Sheffield on the theme of 'Conserving'. Please submit your title with an abstract of no more than 200 words and a brief biography (also of no more than 200 words) to [email protected]. These should be included within your email – i.e. not as attachments. The deadline for abstracts is 15 July 2016. Presentations will be 20 minutes long, and we hope to include work by individuals at different career stages. Sadly we have no money to support travel, accommodation or attendance costs.
Under the Skin is the story of Isserley, a woman who escapes a socially and ecologically ravaged ... more Under the Skin is the story of Isserley, a woman who escapes a socially and ecologically ravaged planet by working secretly in remote Scotland for an opaque corporate concern. In an astonishing reversal of species fortunes, she captures human males who are prepared underground and slaughtered as meat to be consumed by a social elite at home. Faber’s careful focalization of this story through Isserley allows for a subtle, ambiguous and counterintuitive inquiry into the nature of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. In the novel, Isserley’s antagonist is Amlis, a liberationist activist who presents classically liberal arguments for the extension of liberty to the humans. Complicating the book’s politics of species, however, the science fiction and gothic genre effects in the novel deliver a plot that commands the reader to sympathize with a protagonist who enacts murderous views about humans that are analogous to ideas that underpin human use of animals in the meat industry. It is gradually revealed that a commitment to species exceptionalism is Isserley's flawed vision of enlightenment, her protection against the social degradation that has blighted her life. Eventually, she comes to sense that subjection, alienation and bodily vulnerability align her with the human animals she kills, and she finally stops. Via the play of genre and form, then, Under the Skin offers a narrative of the political recognition of nonhuman species that exceeds significantly the established story of enlightened and reasoned recognition of their rights.
‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the gr... more ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we would die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence.’ (George Eliot, Middlemarch)
For Lauren Berlant, Eliot senses that ‘we are taught, from the time we are taught anything, […] to feel appropriately compassionate’. Compassion and coldness, she continues, are ‘two sides of a bargain that the subjects of modernity have struck with structural inequality’. I want to confront the importance of these points for animal ethics. The power of Eliot’s words lies in the imaginative intensity with which they posit unconstrained ethical attentiveness of vision and feeling while mortally precluding it. She rules out responsible feeling for ordinary human experience on the basis of the more radical impossibility of ‘hearing’ plant and animal life; yet must make sense of such experience in order to do so. I will explore the tenuous management of ethical feeling and unfeeling via the discourse of species: the notion of a morally significant difference in kind between humans and other animals. Leaving Eliot’s England for the otherworldly Scotland of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), I will discuss a scene in which an activist argues for the rejection of meat production by the novel’s protagonist on the grounds of an ethics of mercy: an ambivalent nodal point of sensibility and law, compassion and authority, subjection and agency, accountability and imperiousness, weakness and strength. The twist is that the activist and meat producer are nonhuman and the meat is human. This allows me to explore the novel’s challenge to the notion that language capacity absolutely determines species difference, rendering inconsequential those similarities that unite beings under a dual rubric of feeling: shared kinds of sentience (for example, sensitivity to pain) and affective responsiveness, such as flows of empathy and sympathy that are unconstrained by the logic of species.
(on Jacques Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I Am [New York: Fordham UP, 2008]; Cary Wolfe’s A... more (on Jacques Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I Am [New York: Fordham UP, 2008]; Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites: Posthumanism and the Discourse of Species [Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003]; Carrie Rohman’s, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal [New York: Columbia UP, 2009); and Philip Armstrong’s, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity [London: Routledge, 2008])
A review of Mary Bryden, ed., Beckett and Animals. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2013. xv + 230 pp. an... more A review of Mary Bryden, ed., Beckett and Animals. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. xv + 230 pp. and Juliana Schiesari. Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers. Berkley: U of California P, 2012. x + 131 pp.
Abstracts of 350 words, along with a 50-word bio (in email body or in doc.x), can be sent to Sara... more Abstracts of 350 words, along with a 50-word bio (in email body or in doc.x), can be sent to Sarah Bezan ([email protected]) and Robert McKay ([email protected]) by November 23rd, 2018. Early career scholars and post-graduate researchers are expressly encouraged to submit abstracts, and will be eligible to apply for ShARC Travel Awards to defray the costs of travel. Confirmed participants will be notified by late December 2018. An edited volume on ‘Animal Remains’ will be one of the anticipated outcomes of this meeting, and will be considered for publication in the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series.
Zooscope — The Animals in Film Archive is a resource about the presence of animals in the histor... more Zooscope — The Animals in Film Archive is a resource about the presence of animals in the history of film. Each post includes information and analysis about the presence and meaning of animals in a film. Users can navigate by the categories and tags found at the bottom of each page to filter the archive by film genre or by the presence of specific animals or aspects of human-animal relations in the films.
Animals have played a crucial role in the development of film as an artistic medium, from the literal use of animal products in film stock to the capturing of animal movement as a driver of stop-motion, wide-screen and CGI film technology. In terms of content and form, the wish to picture animals’ lives, whether naturalistically or playfully, has led to the establishment of key genres such as wildlife film and animation. ZooScope looks at and beyond these major aspects of animals in film, and entries can consider, inter alia: animals’ role in film genres and styles from arthouse to documentary to horror; the range of literal and symbolic ways animals appear in film; animals in the film star-system; animal lives and the ethics of film-making; adaptation and the different challenges of filmic and literary representation of animals.
Special issue of the journal Antennae co-edited with Susan McHugh, including a short essay by me ... more Special issue of the journal Antennae co-edited with Susan McHugh, including a short essay by me called 'An Illustrated Theriography'.
Wolves lope across Gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to humanity, in the figu... more Wolves lope across Gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to humanity, in the figure of the werewolf they become liminal creatures that move between the human and the animal. Werewolves function as a site for exploring complex anxieties of difference – of gender, class, race, space, nation or sexuality – but the imaginative and ideological uses of wolves also reflect back on the lives of material animals, long persecuted in their declining habitats across the world. Werewolves therefore raise unsettling questions about the intersection of the real and the imaginary, the instability of human identities and the worldliness and political weight of the Gothic.
This is the first volume concerned with the appearance of werewolves and wolves in literary and cultural texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on representations of werewolves and wolves in literature, film, television and visual culture, the essays investigate the key texts of the lycanthropic canon alongside lesser-known works from the 1890s to the present. The result is an innovative study that is both theoretically aware and historically nuanced, featuring an international list of established and emerging scholars based in Britain, Europe, North America and Australia.
A spectrum of scholarship on humans' deadly relationship with animals
Though not often acknowled... more A spectrum of scholarship on humans' deadly relationship with animals
Though not often acknowledged openly, killing represents by far the most common form of human interaction with animals. Humans kill animals for food, for pleasure, to wear, and even as religious acts, yet despite the ubiquity of this killing, analyzing the practice has generally remained the exclusive purview of animal rights advocates.
Killing Animals offers a corrective to this narrow focus by bringing together the insights of scholars from diverse backgrounds in the humanities, including art history, anthropology, intellectual history, philosophy, literary studies, and geography. With killing representing the ultimate expression of human power over animals, the essays reveal the complexity of the phenomenon by exploring the extraordinary diversity in killing practices and the wide variety of meanings attached to them. They examine aspects of the role of animals in human societies, from the seventeenth century to the present day: their cultural manifestations, and how they have been represented. Topics include hunting and baiting; slaughter practices and the treatment of feral and stray animals; animal death in art, literature and philosophy; and even animals that themselves become killers of humans.
While many collections originate as a series of separately planned conference papers drawn together only by editorial fiat, the essays that comprise Killing Animals were regarded as parts of a larger whole from their inception. The result is a remarkably collaborative, cross-disciplinary work that includes eight individually authored chapters and a collectively written introduction. Rather than attempting to produce a single ethical understanding from their diverse views, however, the group aims instead to demonstrate the value of the wider academic study of the place of animals in human history. The conclusion to Killing Animals takes the form of a discussion among the eight contributors, with each expanding upon issues raised earlier in the book.
"Killing Animals by the Animal Studies Group provides compelling material for academics wishing to study our relationship to animals, which consists mostly of violence towards them. This collection of essays is refreshingly informed in its analysis of how this brutality manifests itself in cultural forms."--VegNews
"The eight contributors to the collection entitled Killing Animals provide sufficiently diverse perspectives on the subject to make this book a worthwhile addition to the growing literature regarding animal rights and wrongs."--H-Animal
The Animal Studies Group consists of the following British scholars: Steve Baker (art history, University of Central Lancashire); Jonathan Burt (independent scholar); Diana Donald (art history, Manchester Metropolitan University); Erica Fudge (literary and cultural studies, Middlesex University); Garry Marvin (social anthropology, Roehampton University); Robert McKay (literature, University of Sheffield); Clare Palmer (philosophy and environmental studies, Washington University in St. Louis); and Chris Wilbert (geography, Anglia Ruskin University).
The dream of humanism is to cleanly discard of humanity’s animal remains along with its ecologica... more The dream of humanism is to cleanly discard of humanity’s animal remains along with its ecological embeddings, evolutionary heritages and futures, ontogenies and phylogenies, sexualities and sensualities, vulnerabilities and mortalities. But, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate, animal remains are everywhere and so animals remain everywhere. Animal remains are food, medicine, and clothing; extractive resources and traces of animals’ lifeworlds and ecologies; they are sites of political conflict and ontological fear, fetishized visual signs and objects of trade, veneration, and memory; they are biotechnological innovations and spill-over viruses.
To make sense of the material afterlives of animals, this book draws together multispecies perspectives from literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, anthropology and ethnography, photographic and film history, and contemporary art practice to offer the first synoptic account of animal remains. Interpreting them in all their ubiquity, diversity, and persistence, Animal Remains reveals posthuman relations between human and non-human communities of the living and the dead, on timescales of decades, centuries, and millennia.
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Papers by Robert R McKay
For inquiries about content, contact the SERIES EDITORS:
Susan McHugh, Professor and Chair of English at the University of New England, USA ([email protected])
Robert McKay, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, UK
([email protected])
John Miller, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK ([email protected])
For publishing queries, contact the PALGRAVE MACMILLAN EDITORS:
Ben Doyle, Commissioning Editor, Literature
([email protected])
Ryan Jenkins, Editorial Assistant, Literature
([email protected])
Talks by Robert R McKay
For Lauren Berlant, Eliot senses that ‘we are taught, from the time we are taught anything, […] to feel appropriately compassionate’. Compassion and coldness, she continues, are ‘two sides of a bargain that the subjects of modernity have struck with structural inequality’. I want to confront the importance of these points for animal ethics. The power of Eliot’s words lies in the imaginative intensity with which they posit unconstrained ethical attentiveness of vision and feeling while mortally precluding it. She rules out responsible feeling for ordinary human experience on the basis of the more radical impossibility of ‘hearing’ plant and animal life; yet must make sense of such experience in order to do so. I will explore the tenuous management of ethical feeling and unfeeling via the discourse of species: the notion of a morally significant difference in kind between humans and other animals. Leaving Eliot’s England for the otherworldly Scotland of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), I will discuss a scene in which an activist argues for the rejection of meat production by the novel’s protagonist on the grounds of an ethics of mercy: an ambivalent nodal point of sensibility and law, compassion and authority, subjection and agency, accountability and imperiousness, weakness and strength. The twist is that the activist and meat producer are nonhuman and the meat is human. This allows me to explore the novel’s challenge to the notion that language capacity absolutely determines species difference, rendering inconsequential those similarities that unite beings under a dual rubric of feeling: shared kinds of sentience (for example, sensitivity to pain) and affective responsiveness, such as flows of empathy and sympathy that are unconstrained by the logic of species.
For inquiries about content, contact the SERIES EDITORS:
Susan McHugh, Professor and Chair of English at the University of New England, USA ([email protected])
Robert McKay, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, UK
([email protected])
John Miller, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK ([email protected])
For publishing queries, contact the PALGRAVE MACMILLAN EDITORS:
Ben Doyle, Commissioning Editor, Literature
([email protected])
Ryan Jenkins, Editorial Assistant, Literature
([email protected])
For Lauren Berlant, Eliot senses that ‘we are taught, from the time we are taught anything, […] to feel appropriately compassionate’. Compassion and coldness, she continues, are ‘two sides of a bargain that the subjects of modernity have struck with structural inequality’. I want to confront the importance of these points for animal ethics. The power of Eliot’s words lies in the imaginative intensity with which they posit unconstrained ethical attentiveness of vision and feeling while mortally precluding it. She rules out responsible feeling for ordinary human experience on the basis of the more radical impossibility of ‘hearing’ plant and animal life; yet must make sense of such experience in order to do so. I will explore the tenuous management of ethical feeling and unfeeling via the discourse of species: the notion of a morally significant difference in kind between humans and other animals. Leaving Eliot’s England for the otherworldly Scotland of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), I will discuss a scene in which an activist argues for the rejection of meat production by the novel’s protagonist on the grounds of an ethics of mercy: an ambivalent nodal point of sensibility and law, compassion and authority, subjection and agency, accountability and imperiousness, weakness and strength. The twist is that the activist and meat producer are nonhuman and the meat is human. This allows me to explore the novel’s challenge to the notion that language capacity absolutely determines species difference, rendering inconsequential those similarities that unite beings under a dual rubric of feeling: shared kinds of sentience (for example, sensitivity to pain) and affective responsiveness, such as flows of empathy and sympathy that are unconstrained by the logic of species.
Cambridge UP, 2013. xv + 230 pp. and
Juliana Schiesari. Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets,
Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers.
Berkley: U of California P, 2012. x + 131 pp.
Animals have played a crucial role in the development of film as an artistic medium, from the literal use of animal products in film stock to the capturing of animal movement as a driver of stop-motion, wide-screen and CGI film technology. In terms of content and form, the wish to picture animals’ lives, whether naturalistically or playfully, has led to the establishment of key genres such as wildlife film and animation. ZooScope looks at and beyond these major aspects of animals in film, and entries can consider, inter alia: animals’ role in film genres and styles from arthouse to documentary to horror; the range of literal and symbolic ways animals appear in film; animals in the film star-system; animal lives and the ethics of film-making; adaptation and the different challenges of filmic and literary representation of animals.
This is the first volume concerned with the appearance of werewolves and wolves in literary and cultural texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on representations of werewolves and wolves in literature, film, television and visual culture, the essays investigate the key texts of the lycanthropic canon alongside lesser-known works from the 1890s to the present. The result is an innovative study that is both theoretically aware and historically nuanced, featuring an international list of established and emerging scholars based in Britain, Europe, North America and Australia.
Though not often acknowledged openly, killing represents by far the most common form of human interaction with animals. Humans kill animals for food, for pleasure, to wear, and even as religious acts, yet despite the ubiquity of this killing, analyzing the practice has generally remained the exclusive purview of animal rights advocates.
Killing Animals offers a corrective to this narrow focus by bringing together the insights of scholars from diverse backgrounds in the humanities, including art history, anthropology, intellectual history, philosophy, literary studies, and geography. With killing representing the ultimate expression of human power over animals, the essays reveal the complexity of the phenomenon by exploring the extraordinary diversity in killing practices and the wide variety of meanings attached to them. They examine aspects of the role of animals in human societies, from the seventeenth century to the present day: their cultural manifestations, and how they have been represented. Topics include hunting and baiting; slaughter practices and the treatment of feral and stray animals; animal death in art, literature and philosophy; and even animals that themselves become killers of humans.
While many collections originate as a series of separately planned conference papers drawn together only by editorial fiat, the essays that comprise Killing Animals were regarded as parts of a larger whole from their inception. The result is a remarkably collaborative, cross-disciplinary work that includes eight individually authored chapters and a collectively written introduction. Rather than attempting to produce a single ethical understanding from their diverse views, however, the group aims instead to demonstrate the value of the wider academic study of the place of animals in human history. The conclusion to Killing Animals takes the form of a discussion among the eight contributors, with each expanding upon issues raised earlier in the book.
"Killing Animals by the Animal Studies Group provides compelling material for academics wishing to study our relationship to animals, which consists mostly of violence towards them. This collection of essays is refreshingly informed in its analysis of how this brutality manifests itself in cultural forms."--VegNews
"The eight contributors to the collection entitled Killing Animals provide sufficiently diverse perspectives on the subject to make this book a worthwhile addition to the growing literature regarding animal rights and wrongs."--H-Animal
The Animal Studies Group consists of the following British scholars: Steve Baker (art history, University of Central Lancashire); Jonathan Burt (independent scholar); Diana Donald (art history, Manchester Metropolitan University); Erica Fudge (literary and cultural studies, Middlesex University); Garry Marvin (social anthropology, Roehampton University); Robert McKay (literature, University of Sheffield); Clare Palmer (philosophy and environmental studies, Washington University in St. Louis); and Chris Wilbert (geography, Anglia Ruskin University).
To make sense of the material afterlives of animals, this book draws together multispecies perspectives from literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, anthropology and ethnography, photographic and film history, and contemporary art practice to offer the first synoptic account of animal remains. Interpreting them in all their ubiquity, diversity, and persistence, Animal Remains reveals posthuman relations between human and non-human communities of the living and the dead, on timescales of decades, centuries, and millennia.