ANIMAL POETICS in LITERARY MODERNISM By

QUEER KINSHIPS AND CURIOUS CREATURES: ANIMAL POETICS IN LITERARY MODERNISM by EVA HOFFMANN A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of German and Scandinavian and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2017 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Eva Hoffmann Title: Queer Kinships and Curious Creatures: Animal Poetics in Literary Modernism This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of German and Scandinavian by: Martin Klebes Chair Susan Anderson Core Member Alexander Matthäs Core Member Paul Peppis Institutional Representative and Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2017. ii © 2017 Eva Hoffmann iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Eva Hoffmann Doctor of Philosophy Department of German and Scandinavian June 2017 Title: Queer Kinships and Curious Creatures: Animal Poetics in Literary Modernism My dissertation brings together prose texts and poetry by four writers and poets, who published in German language at the beginning of the twentieth century: Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), and Georg Trakl (1887-1914). All four of these writers are concerned with the inadequacy of language and cognition, the so called Sprachkrise at the turn-of-the- century. In their texts, they challenge the ability of language to function as a means of communication, and as a way to express emotions or relate more deeply to the world. While it is widely recognized that this “crisis of identity” in modernist literature has been a crisis of language all along, I argue in my dissertation that the question of language is ultimately also a question of “the animal.” Other scholars have argued for animals’ poetic agency (e.g. Aaron M. Moe; Susan McHugh), or for the conceptual link between the “crisis of language” and the threat to human exceptionalism in the intellectual milieu of the early twentieth century (Kári Driscoll). My dissertation is the first study that explores the interconnection between Sprachkrise , animality, and the phenomenological philosophy of embodiment. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of phenomenology, iv I illustrate how Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Rilke and Trakl invoke the body as intertwined with animals in complex ways, and employ these animal figures to reconceptualize notions of language and specifically the metaphor. The authors, I argue, engage in a zoopoetic writing, as other forms of life participate as both symbolic and material bodies in the signifying processes. Moreover, I illustrate how their zoopoetic approach involve forms of intimacy and envision figures that fall outside heteronormative sexualities and ontologies, making the case for a queer zoopoetics in Modernist German literature. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Eva Hoffmann GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, 2017, University of Oregon Staatsexamen, 2009, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: German Literature from Nineteenth Century to Today Critical and Literary Animal Studies Gender Studies PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Department of German, 2011 to present GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Bruce M. Abrams LGBTQ Essay Award, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, 2016 Roger Nicholls Emeritus Professor Award Scholarship, Department of German and Scandinavian, 2016 Graduate Summer Translation Award, Global Oregon/Translation Studies Working Group, 2015 Philip Hansen Scholarship, Department of German and Scandinavian, 2014 Miller Family Scholarship, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, 2014 Astrid Williams Award, Department of German and Scandinavian, 2014 vi Philip Hansen Scholarship, Department of German and Scandinavian, 2013 Research Travel Grant, Department of German and Scandinavian, 2012 PUBLICATIONS: “Innocent Objects: Fetishism and Melancholia in Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence. ” Konturen. 8 (2015): n. pag. Web. “‘Jede unserer Seelen lebt nur einen Augenblick:’ Erzählperspektive, Wahrnehmung und Animalität in Hugo von Hofmannsthals ‘Reitergeschichte.’” Studia Austriaca . 23(2015): n. pag. Web. “A Deconstructionist Reading of Kafka’s ‘Die Brücke.’” Pandaemonium Germanicum” 17. 24 (2014): n. pag.Web. vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank the Department of German and Scandinavian for the continuous financial support, especially during the summer months, that made the completion of this dissertation possible. Special thanks are due to my advisor Professor Martin Klebes, whose thoughtful and timely comments, advice, and trust were essential to how this project turned out, and to my committee, Professor Susan Anderson, Professor Alexander Mathäs, and Professor Paul Peppis. viii To my parents, Irene and Thomas, and my brother, Andreas, for their love and support throughout this process. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………1 II. QUEER ZOOPOETICS IN HOFMANNSTHAL’S “REITERGESCHICHTE” (“A TALE OF THE CAVALRY”) ...........17 III. HUMAN-ANIMAL ENTANGLEMENTS AND THE ORIGN OF POETRY: HOFMANNSTHAL’S EIN BRIEF (THE LETTER ) AND DAS GESPRÄCH ÜBER GEDICHTE (THE CONVERSATION ABOUT POETRY ) …………………………………………………….53 IV. A CURIOUS CREATURE AND AN ALL-TOO HUMAN BRIDGE: KAFKA’S TRANSGRESSIVE FIGURES AND THE BEGINNING OF LITERATURE ……………………………………. 88 V. THE POETICS OF PHENOMENOLOGY: ANIMALS IN THE POETRY OF RAINER MARIA RILKE AND GEORG TRAKL ……118 VI. CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………..159 REFERENCES CITED ………………………………………………………..162 x CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? Kari Weil argues for the significance of posing “the animal question” within literary and critical theory: “The idea of ‘the animal’—the instinctive being with presumably no access to language, texts, or abstract thinking—has functioned as an unexamined foundation on which the idea of the human and hence the humanities have been built,” she points out (23). As our understanding of animal language, culture, and morality improves, Weil continues, so must our view of the nature of human and humanities (Ibid.). This reconceptualization of ‘What it means to be human’ yielded to the larger framework of posthumanism and critical animal studies; disciplines that operate under the assumption of, as Cary Wolfe puts it, “embodiments and embeddedness” of human beings in connection to other forms of life ( What is Posthumanism? 6). However, as post-colonial thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter point out, both posthumanism and critical animal studies all too often perpetuate the epistemological framework of ‘the human’ as white, male, and heterosexual— Wynter’s “Man” with a capital ‘M’ (317). Hence, although many theorists within animal studies and posthumanism have approached their analyses from a standpoint that investigates the interlocking categories of race, gender, sexuality, and animality (see, for example, Carol J. Adams, Donna Haraway, Nicole Shukin, and Mel Y. Chen), critical race scholars claim that the pursuit of an animal-centric posthumanism still “effectively sidestep[s] the analytical challenges posed by the categories of race, colonialism, and slavery” (Jackson 671), illustrating the need to continue the work of a self-reflexive 1 analysis that takes intersectional approaches seriously within animal studies and posthumanism. As animality fundamentally is at work in, and in exchange with, the discursive production of human identity categories, ‘the animal’ needs to be the focus of our investigation of how our idea of ‘the human’ is shaped by hegemonic forms of thought and discourse. This assumption of a universal human experience that is represented by ‘the animal’ is mirrored in the determination to read animals exclusively as metaphors and symbols—in short, as “animal imagery”—, which presupposes, as Margot Norris argues, “the use of the concrete to express the abstract” (3). Despite the recent “animal turn” (Weil) in the humanities, animals are still widely treated as metaphors and remain captive to the tropes of allegory to represent a presumably universal experience of ‘the human.’ Such reading practices view ‘the animal’ as “just another tool in our set of literary devices” (Driscoll 228) that can easily be replaced with a different metaphor and still create the same effect and meaning in the reader. Traditional modes of reading and interpreting poetic texts are hence all too often guilty of a certain ignorance toward the specific role of animals in literature, of their relationship to language, and their complex embeddedness with other living beings, including us humans. Such reductionist reading practices not only subsume the diversity of literary animals—“animals created by words,” as Roland Borgards defines the term (“Introduction” 155)—under the singularity of ‘the animal’—a critique that Jacques Derrida poignantly articulates in The Animal That Therefore I Am —but also ignores the specific cultural and historical background from which this particular literary animal emerges, as well as the fact that textual animals influence the lives of actual animals and vice versa. This specific role of animals to be 2 taken “both literally and figuratively, as a material and symbolic resource,” as Nicole Shukin argues (6), places literary animals

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