What Is Zoopoetics? Texts, Bodies, Entanglement
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What Is Zoopoetics? Texts, Bodies, Entanglement Edited by Kári Driscoll & Eva Hoffmann Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature Series Editors Susan McHugh English Department University of New England Biddeford, ME, USA Robert McKay School of English University of Sheffeld Sheffeld, UK John Miller School of English University of Sheffeld Sheffeld, UK Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of execut- ing an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal pres- ences that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, soci- ology and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the separation of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures? This series publishes work that looks, specifcally, at the implications of the ‘animal turn’ for the feld of English Studies. Language is often thought of as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representa- tions of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are convention- ally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifcally human concerns), this series signifcantly extends the new insights of inter- disciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such fguration with the material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embod- ying a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with refer- ence to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and flm to fne art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages. Series Board: Karl Steel (Brooklyn College) Erica Fudge (Strathclyde) Kevin Hutchings (UNBC) Philip Armstrong (Canterbury) Carrie Rohman (Lafayette) Wendy Woodward (Western Cape) More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649 Kári Driscoll · Eva Hoffmann Editors What Is Zoopoetics? Texts, Bodies, Entanglement Editors Kári Driscoll Eva Hoffmann Utrecht University Whitman College Utrecht, The Netherlands Walla Walla, WA, USA Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ISBN 978-3-319-64415-8 ISBN 978-3-319-64416-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64416-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948707 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations. Cover illustration: Blue Whale Fluke - eco2drew/Getty Images Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland CONTENTS Introduction: What Is Zoopoetics? 1 Kári Driscoll and Eva Hoffmann Prelude: I Observe with My Pen 15 Marcel Beyer Part I Texts Hunting Narratives: Capturing the Lives of Animals 27 Nicolas Picard “You Cannot Escape Your Moles”: The Becoming-Animal of Günter Eich’s Late Literary Texts 45 Belinda Kleinhans The Grammar of Zoopoetics: Human and Canine Language Play 63 Joela Jacobs v vi CONTENTS “‘Sire,’ says the fox”: The Zoopoetics and Zoopolitics of the Fable in Kleist’s “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts whilst Speaking” 81 Sebastian Schönbeck Part II Bodies The Light That Therefore I Give (to): Paleonymy and Animal Supplementarity in Clarice Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark 103 Rodolfo Piskorski “Constituents of a Chaos”: Whale Bodies and the Zoopoetics of Moby-Dick 129 Michaela Castellanos Queering the Interspecies Encounter: Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear 149 Eva Hoffmann Myth, Absence, Haunting: Toward a Zoopoetics of Extinction 167 Paul Sheehan Part III Entanglement Spinning Theory: Three Figures of Arachnopoetics 193 Matthias Preuss Impersonal Love: Nightwood’s Poetics of Mournful Entanglement 213 Peter J. Meedom CONTENTS vii Between Encounter and Release: Animal Presences in Two Contemporary American Poems 235 Ann Marie Thornburg Heading South into Town: ipipipipipipip, ah yeah, um, we’re gonna, yeah, ip 253 Catherine Clover Coda: Speaking, Reading, Writing 271 Marcel Beyer Index 275 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Marcel Beyer is an award-winning poet, novelist, and translator based in Dresden, Germany. Three of his novels, Spies (2000), The Karnau Tapes (1997), and Kaltenburg (2012) have been translated into English. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Kleist Prize (2014) and the Büchner Prize (2016). Michaela Castellanos is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at Mid Sweden University. Her research interests lie in animal studies, the environmental humanities, and risk studies. She is the European editor of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, a member of the research network Cultural and Literary Animal Studies (CLAS), and a member the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment (EASLE). Catherine Clover is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her mul- tidisciplinary art practice explores an expanded approach to communi- cation through voice and language and the interplay between hearing/ listening and seeing/reading. She teaches at Swinburne University (MA Writing, BA Media), Melbourne, and RMIT University (BDes Interior Design), Melbourne, and holds a practice led Ph.D. (Fine Art) through RMIT University. Kári Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He holds a Ph.D. (2014) in German Language and Literature from Columbia University. He ix x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS has published on zoopoetics in the works of Franz Kafka, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Luigi Pirandello. He is the coeditor of Book Presence in a Digital Age (Bloomsbury 2018) and, with Susanne C. Knittel, of Memory after Humanism, a special issue of Parallax, 22, no. 4 (2017). He is also an award-winning translator. Eva Hoffmann is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of German Studies and Gender Studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Oregon at the Department of German and Scandinavian, in 2017, and has a gradu- ate certifcate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Oregon. She has published articles on Franz Kafka, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Orhan Pamuk. Joela Jacobs is Assistant Professor of German studies at the University of Arizona. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and works on the intersection of German literature with animal studies, environ- mental humanities, and Jewish studies. She has published articles on monstrosity, multilingualism, literary censorship, biopolitics, animal epistemology, critical plant studies, and contemporary German Jewish identity. Her current book manuscript maps a microgenre of circa 1900 grotesque German literature that creatively animates nonhuman life- forms to answer the question what it means to be human in the modern world. Belinda Kleinhans is Assistant Professor of German at Texas Tech University. She received her Ph.D. in German from the University of Waterloo (Ontario) in 2013. Her research interests are in the areas of biopolitics in literature, cultural and literary animal studies, literary texts, and the philosophy of language, and issues of representation. She has mainly published in the feld of cultural animal studies. Peter J. Meedom teaches English and Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo (Norway), where he earned his Ph.D. with a disser- tation on the relationship