Among the Animals (Syllabus)

Pratiques, 2019

2016

Author(s): Sylvia, Olga | Advisor(s): Hampton, Timothy | Abstract: This dissertation discusses the status of animals in sixteenth century French texts of various literary and non-literary genres. It aims at demonstrating the significant shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance with regards to the literary portrayal of animals, which were no longer regarded in the allegorical tradition but rather as a subject matter. These changes in philosophers’ perceptions of animals were conditioned by the intersection of two major phenomena taking place at the time – geographical explorations exposing new knowledge about unknown animals and species, and a rediscovery of classical texts that challenged the Aristotelian vision of a hierarchy of species. As a result, scholars were urged to break the old tradition of animals’ representation as a vehicle of human flaws and social differences, and created instead a new role for animals for the first time in the history of Western civilization. Th...

Since the field of Animal Studies has opened up, the human and social sciences, in North American and in Europe, have developed an almost exclusive interest in the human side of this subject, examining human uses, practices and most particularly human representations of animals, in part because of a certain scholarly infatuation with cultural studies since the 1980s.1 After having used these approaches myself many times, I feel they are now insufficient because they have created and maintained a blind spot at their center: that of animals as feeling, acting, responding beings, who have their own initiatives and reactions. Scholars have had much to say about humans, and very little to say about animals, who remain absent or are transformed into simple pretexts, pure objects on which human representations, knowledge, practices are exercised without consequence. In this sense, the history of animals that has developed over the last thirty years is in reality a human history of animals where these latter have very little place as real beings. Looking at Real Animals We must move away from this approach rooted in a Western cultural worldview that has impoverished the dialectical theme of humans and animals, reducing it to a field with one magnetic pole (humans) and a single directional pull (humans towards animals) thus forgetting or dismissing much of its reality and complexity. We must look more closely at the influence of animals in their relationships with humans, at their role as actual actors, in light of ethology's growing insistence-at least for certain species and an increasing number of them-on the behaviors of each animal as actor, individual, and even person; on the cognitive capacities of animal individuals; and on the sociability and cultures of animal groups-and thus revealing the inadequacies of purely human approaches. Similarly, historical documents show, when this information is not rejected as anecdotal, that humans have seen or foreseen and assessed animal interests and have reacted, acted, and imagined as a result. We must leave the human side, moving to the animal side,2 in order to better understand human/animal relationships but also in order to better know these living actor-beings who deserve to be studied in and of themselves. This means that the definition of history must be broadened, abandoning the too restricted definition of "a science of humans in time,"3 in which many historians have become entrenched. This definition is not inviolable; it has been historically constructed, from Fustel de Coulanges to Bloch, with two events being of particular importance: first, the formation of the human sciences as a means to studying the human independently of the natural sciences that had a certain monopoly on knowledge; and second, the broadening of the human sciences during the 1900s to 1930s to include the study of all aspects of the human and not just those related to the political. It is now time to redefine history as the "science of all living beings in time" and to become interested in these living beings' evolutions, at the very least in those evolutions that have been recorded in diverse historical documents and that could be the object of study for a historian versed in the field. At the same time, we must go beyond the cultural approach-note that I did not say abandon this approach-that tends to reduce the human and social sciences to an exercise in deconstruction and close examination of social discourses, and thus arrive at representations that are considered to be the only observable reality. This work is necessary; but the success of cultural approaches has transformed an essential preliminary step into an ultimate finality. We must once again be searching for realities using the concept of "situated knowledges"4 to validate a building of knowledge that is not ignorant of, nor taken in by, its context of elaboration. We need to apply this to the diverse human actors who have used, become close to, and observed animals, and who have become witnesses to animals in varying degrees using observation and representation. We need to take into account the conditions under which these discourses were produced so that when we bring together, test and critique information that is partial-in the sense of being incomplete and biased-we arrive at some sense of that reality. We must also abandon the culturally constructed Western notion of animals as passive beings and see them instead as feeling, responding, adapting, and suffering. In other words, we need to start with the hypothesis that animals are not only actors that influence humans, but that they are also individuals with their own specific set of characteristics, they are even people with their own behaviors, in short, they are subjects. These ideas are no longer taboo5 and should be tested in the field while leaving room for some flexibility in how the definitions are used. We must refrain from starting with (too-well) defined concepts, whose reality we hope to prove, because then we simply configure these concepts according to the form we know best, that is, the human form, or more precisely the European human form at a given time, and once again we fall into the trap of ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism. We must realize that our concepts are always situated: in time, as historians show us; in space, as ethnologists point out6; and amongst living beings as ethologists are beginning to demonstrate.7 Western culture has defined the subject as thinking, self-conscious, and as having recourse to conscious choices and strategies, all the while forgetting that this definition-that it takes as the definition-is in fact a situated, inferred version of the human. Moreover, this underlying portrait includes a set of philosophical implications that place humanity at the top as absolute reference, just as the Western world placed itself at the top in the past. When one clings to this definition while observing animals, one uses a discourse of domination as a tool of investigation, arriving at the already-drawn conclusion that there are no subjects among animals. It is when more supple definitions are adopted that one can envisage the concept of animals as subjects or come to a conclusion even if not all the parameters are met. We must remember that we have just barely begun to search for these parameters in the animal world; if we find that these parameters lack some consistency, it may be that we need to consider a greater plurality of meanings. Experimenting with key concepts does not mean falling into the trap of anthropomorphism, just as attributing flexibility and suppleness to concepts under investigation does not mean sliding into vague impressionism. What such an approach entails is a form of critical anthropomorphism that watches with curiosity, asks difficult questions, tries out critical concepts, observes without prejudice, and avoids an already conclusive anthropomorphism that foists humanity on animality and thus denies their specificities. It also entails being as open as possible to the potential capabilities of animals, many of whom we still do not know very well. Finally, this approach means seeing the diverse expressions of different faculties in order to adopt wider definitions of them. This is already being done for physical abilities (we know that many species do not see the world as we do but we do not deduce from this that they can not see), but we remain reticent when it comes to doing the same for mental abilities because these are what allow us to value ourselves over animals. This is not a question of mixing up all living beings, but rather it is a question of appreciating the diversity of all and the richness of each one. This means abandoning the shallow, puerile, distorted dualism that opposes humans to animals and in which philosophies and religions have trapped us for the last 2500 years. First, this dualism is shallow because it opposes a concrete species, the human, to a concept, the animal, that does not exist in the fields nor in the streets and that is nothing more than a category masking the reality of a multiplicity of species that are each very different. Second, this dualism is puerile because it poses the question of a difference

Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 2012

Literary Animal Studies began, as did most of the disciplines that contribute to Animal Studies and Human-Animal Studies, in the 1980s. That era of raised social-consciousness opened academic disciplines to many new perspectives. The unique contribution Animal Studies made was to suggest that other-than-human perspectives not only existed but could expand and enhance human consciousness beyond what since the Middle Ages had been believed to be the impermeable boundary between human and animal. Increased knowledge and awareness of nonhuman possibility came and continues to come from virtually every existing academic discipline. What Literary Animal Studies contributes to the mix is the news that the arts, their roots in humans' earliest response to the world and those they shared it with, still retain the power to rekindle that deep time when the boundary between human and animal was permeable, when humans knew they were one among many other animals, and anthropocentrism had not yet emerged to deny that kinship.

Literary transformations from human to animal have occurred in myths, folklore, fairy tales and narratives from all over the world since ancient times, and have always provided a narrative space for depictions of power, agency, and the radical nature of change. In Following the Animal, these transformations are analysed with regards to their use in modern literature from northern-most Europe, with specific attention being paid to the insights they provide regarding the human-animal relationship, both generally in the industrialized West, and against the background of more specific circumstances in the Nordic area. In three analytic chapters, focusing respectively on Swedish author August Strindberg’s novel Tschandala (1887), Finnish author Aino Kallas’s novel The Wolf’s Bride (1928), and Danish author Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen’s short story “The Monkey” (1934), along with discussions of a range of other authors and texts, the reader is introduced to several traditions of literary production that both connect to, and differ from, Anglophone and other literature in fascinating ways. In addition to the insights it provides concerning the uses of human-animal transformations in modern Nordic literature, and their significance in relation to “the question of the animal”, Following the Animal also offers literary scholars and students alike a series of useable and transferable strategies for approaching texts from a “more-than-anthropocentric”, human-animal studies perspective. In phrasing and employing the interpretational method of “following the animal” over the text’s surface, up metaphorical elevations, down material wormholes, and in constant dialogue with previous research, this book contributes greatly to both human-animal literary studies specifically, and to the field of literary scholarship generally, in both an international and northern-European context.

published in: in: Mondes animaliers au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance / Tierische Welten im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance, ed. D. Buschinger et al., Amiens, Presses du "Centre d'Études Médiévales de Picardie, 2016, pp. 327-337. Christine de Pizan refers to animals less frequently than do her Middle French contemporaries, many of whom she knew personally such as Évrart de Conty and Jean Gerson. For example, in a corpus of over 600,000 words, Gerson refers to dogs 86 times, Christine in a corpus of over a million words only 49 times. Her prose writings are, in general, political treatises dealing with issues of female regency, peace theory or military tactics, so that one would not immediately expect to find many animal images here. Most of the animals she refers to show up either in her lyrical works or in the Epistre Othea. Nonetheless, animal imagery holds a key for understanding how she creates referentiality for her writings. In order to how she creates referentiality, it is necessary first to establish benchmarks for literary fauna in medieval French. These benchmarks reveal a lexical superstructure inherent in medieval French because writers in all genres tend to refer to the same eleven animals (lions, horses, dogs, serpents, sheep, and so on) with more or less the same frequency. Second, one needs to move from the omnipresence of these eleven animals to the fortune of the lonely nightingale; here we will witness the instability of linguistic referentiality in animal images. Third, it is useful to compare how Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson treat the meaning of serpent in their works: Christine follows a rigid hierarchy in assigning meaning, whereas Jean Gerson avoids polyvalence by immediately supplying a cultural context that supplies meaning in the first place. Benchmarks for Literary Fauna and Lexical Frequency of Animal Names in Évrart de Conty, Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson In order to understand Christine's use of animal imagery, we first need to establish a rough norm for what could be termed the medieval French " animal imaginary. " In order to create rough benchmarks for " literary fauna, " I analyze examples taken from Godefroy, Tobler-Lommatzsch, the online Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (now over seven million words) and examples found in a private (because of copyright issues) searchable database created over the last five years by myself and David Wrisley (now NYU/Abu Dhabi).

(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])

Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, ed. Michael Lundblad, 2017

The End of the Animal--Literary and Cultural Animalities

Stories of shape-changing monsters, lycanthropy, and cursed men have been told for countless centuries, living in memory as tragedies, folk tales, and warnings to audiences and readers. The were-creatures of myth and legend were often described as cursed by gods, witches, magic, and-later-the Christian Devil. To those who know of such tales, lycanthropic monsters were hardly heroes; in fact, most were hardly better than mindless beasts, terrorizing the local populace and maiming and killing with wild abandon. The animalistic identity of the shapeshifter often proved to be the danger lurking within an otherwise normal community or individual, and the change from animal to man and back again is shown as a powerful, evil force, a theme which would continue into the Middle Ages and beyond, securing for the werewolf a sordid and troubled history in the minds of readers and lay-folk even in today's enlightened context. Indeed, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner writes that "If, as human beings, we all share a dual nature and must struggle to subordinate our lower animal appetites to the higher human faculties of reason and love, then the werewolf represents an extreme case of the general human category," one in which evil, base instincts take over and control the body (256). Werewolves are thus positioned as a dangerous "other" figure, one in which the elements of the beast take over the governing righteousness of free will and human thought. Because of this, the monstrous animality of the werewolf and other shape-changers are positioned in binary opposition with the human aspects of nobility and love that are exhibited by non-lycanthropic agents. However, the shape-changing nature of lycanthropes complicates this deceptively easy distinction between human and animal, especially when one takes into account that a werewolf is human more often than he or she is a wolf. Are the monstrous actions the actions of the human, or the actions of the 1