Introduction : Avian Subjectivity, Genre, and Feminism 1
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NOTES Introduction : Avian Subjectivity, Genre, and Feminism 1 . See Donna Haraway’s comments on “becoming animal” wherein she con- siders actual animals, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008), pp. 27–30. 2 . A nyghtyngale, upon a cedre grene, Under the chambre wal ther as she ley, Ful loude song ayein the moone shene, Peraunter in his briddes wise a lay Of love, that made hire herte fressh and gay . And as she slep, anonright tho hire mette How that an egle, fethered whit as bon, Under hire brest his longe clawes sette, And out hire herte into hire brest to gon— Of which she nought agroos, ne nothyng smerte— And forth he fleigh, with herte left for herte. ( Troilus and Criseyde , II, 918–22, 925–31) All Chaucer citations are from The Riverside Chaucer , 3rd ed., gen ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), by line number. 3 . Many have commented on the association of bird song with human speech in medieval texts. See, for example, Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), p. 193. 4 . This belabored term needs probing as the distinctions between human and animal become more ephemeral and culture coded. 5 . Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1989, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, gen. ed., Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), pp. 2084–95. 6 . Patrick D. Murphy, “Prolegomenon for an Ecofeminist Dialogics,” Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic , ed. Dale M. Bauer and S. Jaret McKinstry (Albany: State U of New York P, 1991), p. 49. 7 . Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, 1974 (rpt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985), pp. 134–35. 8 . See Cadava about the complex notion of subjectivity, and Patterson and Leicester on its application to medieval texts. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean- Luc Nancy, eds., Who Comes after the Subject? 156 NOTES (New York: Routledge, 1991); Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991); H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990). 9 . Leicester, The Disenchanted Self, p. 415. 10 . Leicester, The Disenchanted Self, p. 416. See also Gilles Deleuze, “A Philosophical Concept,” Who Comes after the Subject, ed. Cadava, p. 94. 11 . Peter Haidu, “Althusser Anonymous in the Middle Ages,” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7.1 (Spring 1995): 69. 12 . A major exception is the nonhuman agents of the poet in Carolynn Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents: Cause and Representation in Chaucerian Narrative (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2006), pp. 73–107. 13 . “Neither Nature nor the workings of mounted violence require ideo- logical subjectification. Both Nature and the police power deploy the violence of force, directly applied, or its threat,” Haidu, “Althusser,” 71. 14 . Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman , p. 139. 15 . Terence Rafferty, “No Pussycat,” New Yorker , June 20, 1994: 88. 16 . For a compelling philosophical argument on the dual repressions, see Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993). See also Karen J. Warren, ed., Ecological Feminism (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Karen J. Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990); Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991); Greta Gaard, ed., Women, Animals, Nature (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993); Lynda Birke, Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew (Buckingham: Open UP, 1994); Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, eds., Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Durham: Duke UP, 1995); and Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, eds., Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals (New York: Continuum, 1996). For ecofeminism in literary studies, see Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, eds., Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1998); Patrick D. Murphy, Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1995), as well as his “Prolegomenon.” 17 . In context, Murphy tells us: “An ecofeminist dialogics requires this effort to render the other, primarily constituted by androcentrism as women and nature (and actually as the two intertwined: nature-as- woman and woman- as-nature), as speaking subjects within patriarchy in order to subvert that patriarchy not only by decentering it but also by proposing other centers,” Murphy, Literature, Nature, and Other , pp. 12–13. 18 . Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: U of California P), p. 92. NOTES 157 19 . Hansen, Chaucer, pp. 15–25. 20 . Plumwood, Feminism, p. 5. 21 . See Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2004). In a medieval literary context, Eugene Vance addresses the intersection of man and beast (lion and knight) in Yvain. Eugene Vance, From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987), pp. 53–108. 22 . Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents, pp. 76–79. For more on medieval inquiry into animals, in addition to the other works cited above, see, for example, Jan M. Ziolkowski, Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Best Poetry, 750–1150 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993); Susan Crane, “For the Birds,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society 29 (2007): 23–41; Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1994); L. A. J. R. Houwen, ed., Animals and the Symbolic in Mediaeval Art and Literature (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1997); Nona C. Flores, ed., Animals in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays (New York: Garland, 1996); Karen Blanco, Of “Briddes and Beestes”: Chaucer’s Use of Animal Imagery as a Means of Influence in Four Major Poetic Works, Dissertation Abstracts International (56.3) 1995, 920A, U of Southern California; David E. Southmayd, Chaucer and the Medieval Conventions of Bird Imagery, Dissertations Abstracts International (41.8) 1981, 3596A, McGill University. Also, an issue of Postmedieval: Journal of Medieval and Cultural Studies 2 (2011) addresses these concerns, as will an upcoming collection by Carolynn Van Dyke, Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan) (forthcoming). 23 . Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham UP, 2008), p. 12. The category of animal studies has developed into a burgeoning critical area. See, for example, Lynda Birke and Luciana Parisi, “Animals, Becoming,” Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, ed. H. Peter Steeves (Albany: State U of New York P, 1999), pp. 55–73 as well as the other essays addressing the definition of human in this collection. See also Alan Bleakley, The Animalizing Imagination: Totemism, Textuality and Ecocriticism (New York: St. Martin’s P, 2000); Nigel Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002); Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, eds., Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History (New York: Routledge, 1997); Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993); Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000); Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003); Vicki Hearne, Ad am’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Akadine P, 1982; rpt. 2000); Cary Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003); Derek Bickerton, Language and Species (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990); Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us 158 NOTES Human (Washington, DC: Island P, 1996). See also the March 2009 issue of PMLA devoted to animal studies, 124.2 (March 2009). 24 . Derrida, The Animal, p. 11. Derrida later adds: “All the philosophers we will investigate (from Aristotle to Lacan, and including Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas), all of them say the same thing: the animal is deprived of language . the single being that remains without a response, and without a word with which to respond,” The Animal, p. 32. 25 . Derrida, The Animal, pp. 90, 57, 12. 26 . Derrida, The Animal, p. 7. 27 . For a more Freudian and metaphoric analysis of these philosophi- cal issues, see Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000). 28 . Derrida, The Animal, pp. 7, 155, 160. 29 . Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P, 2008), p. 21. 30 . Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 21. 31 . Plumwood, Feminism, p. 55. 32 . Plumwood, Feminism, p. 72. From another angle, Julia Kristeva believes that Bakhtin’s dialogic discourses, those kinds of disruptive utterances that I will examine below, stand “against Aristotelian logic,” Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), p. 55. 33 . Plumwood situates the problem historically: “Universal Nature, consid- ered as the workings of rational scientific principles, plainly includes the bulldozer as well as the rainforest, in addition to the process by which the one destroys