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Book of Abstracts Dr. John Miller (University of Sheffield) Animals, Capital, Literature and the Victorians: Writing the Fur Trade The difference between what we think of as ‘animal’ and what we think of as ‘human’ is routinely conceptualised as a fullness on the side of the human against a poverty on the side of the animal. In response, animal studies, in its emergence over the last twenty years or so, has set about dismantling this crude logic and broadening the scope of humanities research to include the nonhuman. Although at this juncture of the twenty first century, animal studies has the status of an emerging field of study, many of its central concerns are significant ingredients of nineteenth-century thought. Evolutionary theory radically destabilised entrenched ideas of human–animal difference; animal advocacy flowered, through the work of the RSPCA, the vegetarian society and the humanitarian League amongst others; the connections of discourses of species to discourses of race, class and gender became increasingly clear, and increasingly subject to debate, as the century progressed. At the same time, the use of animal bodies in a developing commodity culture accelerated to a remarkable degree, marking the Victorian period, in particular, as an era of extraordinary violence. This paper explores one of the most disturbing examples of this objectification of animal life: the global fur trade. I am interested especially in the ways in which literary fiction both bolstered and contested the conceptions of value behind the fur trade’s commodifying processes. How, I ask, do literature and capital entwine in the imagining of animals as resources to be consumed? Simone Rebora (Università di Verona) “It’s as semper as oxhousehumper!” James Joyce’s animalisation of the human Few animals can be met through the works of James Joyce. An unnamed cat and threatening dog in Ulysses, a deceiving feline in the short story The Cat and the Devil, some insects (earwigs, ants and grasshoppers) and an inquisitive hen in Finnegans Wake. But animality plays a crucial symbolic role in the late joycean poetics. Starting from The Oxen of the Sun, generally known as one of the most complex episodes of Ulysses, in which human evolution is described through the disgregation of language, the symbol of the ox is taken as a synthesis of the human ability to think and communicate. And the analysis of the message found by the hen Biddy Doran on a pile of dung in Finnegans Wake brings to an experience of the wholeness of meaning: referring to the cabalistic triad of the ox, the house and the camel (alpha, beta and gamma), its interpretation could develop through eternity, but the final wisdom is «as semper as oxhousehumper» (FW, 116): it’s already known from the beginning. My contribution will propose a close analysis of these and of some other passages from Finnegans Wake (e.g. the two tales called «The Mookse and the Gripes», FW, 152-155, and «The Ondt and the Gracehoper», FW, 414-418, satirical adaptations of the well-known Aesopian fables), stressing the importance given to physiological functions (the most basic, which associate man to animals) in the acts of communication and interpretation. The theoretical ground will be cast through the philosophy of Giambattista Vico (explicitly quoted, but freely used by Joyce) and of the late Ludwig Wittgenstein, who suggested the power of communication “beyond words”. Eirini Apanomeritaki (University of Essex) The animal as writer: hybrid subjectivity, loss and mourning in Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales Marie Darrieussecq’s debut novel Pig Tales , originally published in France in 1996, is the shockingly realistic account of a hybrid narrator’s adventures in a dystopian version of contemporary Paris. Written in the form of an autobiography, the story exposes the most private thoughts of a woman who finds herself changing into a pig. The anonymous narrator is led into a peculiar state of writing “piggle-squiggles”, emphasizing that the act of writing in her notebook keeps her in contact with both her animal and her human side. Speaking as if retrospectively, the narrator of Pig Tales starts telling her story after she has gained some intuition of her double nature, now being a pig with human hands. In this phantasmagoric, third-wave feminist, tale of a pig woman, Darrieussecq engages with the pressing issue of how we define the human as opposed or coexisting with the animal; it is suggested that the hierarchical way in which society treats women is comparable to the way in which it treats animals, but also that feminine humans and animals have some special gifts that can be realised not so much by opposing but by going beyond the prescriptive discourse on women and animals. For Darrieussecq, hybrid identity focuses on the animal-human coexistence and the imperative of the acceptance of this hybridity for writing to emerge. However, the act of writing, which is presented as being triggered by the loss of the protagonist’s werewolf-mate, is arguably a human privilege. The protagonist’s mourning over the loss of another hybrid being allows her human self to come to light and thus become able to write. The pig-natured woman is able to record the experiences of an underprivileged woman but also of a farm animal. The paper addresses the debate on human and animal interaction by focusing on the issue of interspecies mourning and writing in relation to Julia Kristeva’s theories on depression and melancholia (1992) and animal studies on grief, such as Barbara J. King’s How Animals Grieve (2013). Paolo Bugliani (Università di Pisa) «Occhi di gatto»: prospettivismo felino e ‘profondità’ saggistica «Quand je me joue à ma chatte, qui sçait si elle passe son temps de moy plus que je ne fay d'elle». Nel bel mezzo dell’ Apologie de Raymond Sebond , oasi d’impianto dogmatico e sistematico all’interno di una raccolta, gli Essais , altrimenti votata al particolare e perfino all’idiosincratico, Montaigne si lascia andare a questa considerazione estemporanea e, con una mossa decisamente imprevista e imprevedibile, sposta il punto di vista sul polo animale, operando un abbassamento, uno sprofondamento che si rivela particolarmente significativo. In un testo come l’ Apologie , che potrebbe apparire non in linea con lo spirito nomadico e libertario della forma saggio e delle divagazioni intellettuali a cui Montaigne ha abituato i suoi lettori, l’apparizione della gatta serve a ricondurre le fila dell’argomentazione entro i confini del particolare, scongiurando la deriva universalista. Il mio intervento propone una lettura dell’‘episodio della gatta’ in Montaigne alla luce di questa idea di un necessario straniamento verso il basso, accostandolo ad un altro momento di slittamento: il «Frammento B» del Jubilate Agno [1722] di Christopher Smart, dove il gatto Jeoffrey e le sue abitudini smorzano il tono solenne della predica religiosa. In un senso analogo, per cercare di stabilire la continuità di un’identica figura di pensiero, mi sembra di potere leggere l’aneddoto del Derrida nudo di fronte alla gatta, impiegato dal filosofo per ancorare le proprie riflessioni sull’animalità al mondo esperienziale, dove l’animale domestico sembra incaricato di richiamare all’ordine un discorso che rischia di farsi troppo altisonante. Questi esempi possono essere ricollegati tutti attraverso l’idea di bathos , l’affascinante «art of sinking» formulata da Alexander Pope [1727] in contrapposizione al sublime ascensionale e solenne di Longino. Al pari di una zavorra che contrasta lo spiccare di un volo metafisico, la presenza di questi «mici saggistici» diventa artificio argomentativo la cui importanza va oltre la stessa riflessione sull’animalità, ricollegandosi a dinamiche connesse con lo statuto del saggio come genere letterario caratterizzato dall’immanenza dell’individualità, anziché alla trascendenza della dimensione puramente speculativa. Maria Luisa Pani (Università di Cagliari) La riflessione sul mondo animale nello Zibaldone di Giacomo Leopardi Dalle prime poesie puerili passando alle Dissertazioni filosofiche e alle Operette morali, attraverso le numerose annotazioni zibaldoniane, fino ai versi maturi dei Paralipomeni e de La Ginestra, Leopardi dedica sempre particolare attenzione agli animali anche all’interno di una più generale riflessione sull’ordine naturale. Lo Zibaldone di pensieri è il testo privilegiato in cui tali riflessioni sull’animalità si concentrano facendo riferimento anche ad importanti fonti scientifiche come la moderna Histoire Naturelle di George Louis Leclerc di Buffon. In un continuo confronto tra uomo e bestia, che si rivela importante non solo per la messa in crisi di un modello antropocentrico che considerava l’alterità quale corrispettivo di inferiorità ma anche per una concezione dell’animale nella sua autonomia e nella sua essenza, Leopardi dimostra di nutrire un interesse costante e non casuale verso un simile argomento che interessa diversi campi: dall’antropologia alla filosofia, dalla scienza alla letteratura. Il riscontro di punti di contatto e di distanza tra la natura umana e quella animale da occasione all’autore di affrontare concetti, questioni, motivi e temi centrali del suo pensiero quali, ad esempio, quelli riguardanti il linguaggio e la comunicazione, l’assuefazione, la sociabilità, il piacere e l’infelicità, la spiritualità e la materialità degli esseri viventi e del loro modo di sentire e concepire la vita. Attraverso rimandi precisi e con il calcolo di tutta una serie di occorrenze si intende pertanto dar conto dell’eventuale evoluzione o comunque del percorso compiuto, in un determinato arco temporale quale quello circoscritto all’interno dello Zibaldone, dalla meditazione teorica sugli animali da parte di Leopardi con rispettiva applicazione anche in altre opere, cercando di metterne in luce il metodo seguito, le fonti d’ispirazione e le motivazioni che stanno alla base di determinate considerazioni. Eleonora Gironi Carnevale (Universitá degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale") Il ‘Clownguro’: metafora viva e anamorfismo in Sfinks di Andrej Belyj Chi afferra la massima irrealtà, plasmerà la massima realtà.
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