The modernisation of human civilisation demands sacrifices of other species for work, food, clothing, medical research, space exploration – and human self affirmation. To enable the asymmetrical relations, a hierarchical dualism between Man and Animal has been constructed and is maintained by a mechanism of continual differentiation. My aim in this article is to consider how literary fiction may take part in the denaturalisation of this mechanism, named by Giorgio Agamben as the ”anthropological machine”. For this purpose I highlight five different meetings between apes and humans, as narrated in Swedish novels from the last decades, and analyse them from an ethical and animal discourse point of view. My readings demonstrate how literature can call acute attention to the recurrent human blockage of the face of the animal other, and to the emotional unsettlement evoked by this act. Hereby, I argue, the human/animal divide is put into question as a relevant basis of ethical decision.
The European cultural heritage from the early modern era is full of colonial content. For instance, “exotic” animals, trafficked to Europe from the colonies, often appear as motifs in paintings and sculptures. This is the case in the oil painting Two Chained Monkeys by Bruegel the Elder from 1562. Through the centuries, the two monkeys in the painting have been interpreted in different ways: as material proof of the owner’s worldwide power, as religious symbols of the debased human, or as political metaphors for human warfare and imprisonment. With her ekphrastic poem “Bruegel’s Two Monkeys” (1957), the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska breaks this trend of “symptomatic interpretation” and reads the monkeys as monkeys. As I argue in the chapter, Szymborska hereby makes the type of critical “surface reading” for which the academic field of human-animal studies generally aims. Szymborska’s poem, furthermore, creatively rearranges the painting’s scenery, thereby effectively blocking the anthropocentric-colonial gaze and creating new space for the monkeys’ agency. Principally, the chapter argues that artistic and academic endeavors may have mutually supportive functions in their acts of critically revisiting and rereading the cultural heritage from the colonial era.
Artikeln bygger på en jämförande analys av Hemingways Och solen har sin gång och Michael Roskams film Bullhead. Enligt argumentationen använder båda dessa verk nötkreaturet - tjuren - för att problematisera manlig sexualitet, men också för att utvinna mänsklig dramatik genom att visa upp djurs lidande och död. Djuren blir på detta sätt medel för att tala om mänskliga problem, medan narrativet lämnar deras eget öde därhän. Artikeln gör gällande att denna tendens hänger samman med det maktschema mellan varelser av olika arter och kön som Jacques Derrida kallat "carnofallogocentrism".
Essän undersöker känslornas plats och materialisering i Sonja Åkessons poetiska språk och hur känslokommunikationen i hennes dikt samexisterar en grundläggande misstro mot språkets funktionalitet.
Essän gör en läsning av den persiska poeten Forough Farrokhzad och undersöker hennes röst och roll i iransk litterär kvinnofrigörelse, utifrån en parallell med svensk och europeisk kvinnlig poesi på 60-70-talet och den position/handling som Cixous kallar écriture féminine.
Essän tar avstamp i en installation med uppstoppade hästar av konstnären Javier Balmaseda, visad på konstbiennalen i Venedig 2013. Diskussionen rör de etiska dimensionerna vid användning av djurkroppar i konsten, med referens även till Robert Rauschenbergs getinstallation "Monogram" på Moderna museet, samt till Steve Bakers forskning om djur i konsten, inklusive den nyutgivna boken Artist Animal.
Artikeln undersöker hur berättelser om människor och apor, från scala natuae, via evolutionsberättelsen till moderna romaner förhållit sig till konstruktionen av tid och temporalitet - hur exempelvis bilden av tävling mellan människa och apa - där människan tar sig upp och fram, medan apan hamnar på efterkälken, bidragit till idén om progressiv, kronologisk tid, medan andra mer hybridiska berättelser öppnar möjligheter för andra sätt att tänka tid. Artikeln anknyter teoretiskt bl a till Julia Kristevas tidstankar, tolkade av Fanny Söderbäck i termer av "revolutionär tid".
By tradition the humanities have been anthropocentrically focused on the lives of human beings in arts and literature. The limited analysis of what other species do in literature – and of the different relations between humans and animals that are represented – has sustained the notion of a hierachical divide between humans and other species, thereby reducing the ethical potential of literature to resist that dualism. The growing field of human–animal studies proposes that we return to our artefacts and epistemologies, with new attention to human–animal relations. Inspired by this movement, forefronted by scholars such as Cary Wolfe and Sara McHugh, this article offers a comparative reading of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Sara Stridsberg’s Darling River (2010). In Lolita Nabokov makes frequent use of animal and especially monkey metaphors, and carries out an ongoing animalization of his characters. In Stridsberg’s novel, which is written as a kind of hypertext of Lolita, Nabokov’s animalizations are interestingly molded and materialized into one physical creature: the caged schimpanzee Ester. The central concern of the study is to understand the process and effects of this materialization. I argue that the consequential reorientation of the reader to a non-hierarchical species discourse is a major ethical feat of the novel.
In children’s literature nonhuman primates are often represented either as ferocious beasts or as curios and charmful vicarious children. In this article I demonstrate how these different constructions interestingly coexist in the popular story ‘‘The monkey that would not kill’’, written by the Scottish evangelist and professor of the natural sciences Henry Drummond in 1891. My study anchors the figuration of the monstrous ape historically in a Christian discourse and the figuration of the childlike ape in a zoological discourse, and link them to the literary genres of horror and comedy, respectively. Both of the figurations are anthropocentric in their reductive ways of representing the ape as strange enemy or subordinate ‘‘friend’’: they confirm the hierarchic dualism between man and ape. My reading also points out the excessive passion that characterizes the meeting between the species in the story, as a kind of leakage from the dualism. In light of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the ‘‘anthropological machine’’, I conclude the article reflecting on the human shepherd’s energetic attempts to kill the animal not only as an act of domination, but also as bearing witness to the obsession with ‘‘experimenting’’ with other primates, in order to consolidate a human species identity.
Recension av bokserien Stemmer (1-12) från Aschehougs förlag
Zoopoetic studies investigate “texts that are, in one way or another, predicated upon an engagement with animals and animality (human and nonhuman),” to quote Kári Driscoll and Eva Hoffman. A central question in this field concerns the relation between language and species. This article suggests that two basic views can be discerned: one that conceptualizes language as a human-specific capacity, and another that frames language as a broader phenomenon that humans and most other species have in common. These two starting points – the first accentuating differences, the second emphasizing similarities – give rise to two different approaches to zoopoetry. In the first case, zoopoetry is associated with the deconstruction of human semantics and, thus, of human power. In the second case, zoopoetry is seen as an experiment in which the attentive human poet comes together with animals in a natural act of mutual poiesis.
The aim of the article is to uncover the genealogy of these two views – here named the “language sceptic” perspective and the “language affirmative” perspective, respectively – and to problematize them as scholarly reading positions. Using examples from Les Murray’s animal poetry, the article argues that the two perspectives might more fruitfully be explored as two dimensions that exist and create interesting friction within zoopoetic texts – hence an oscillation between the perspectives is preferable.
Mötet är ett ledord i Christine Farhans långa gärning som forskare, lärare och ledare. För att hylla henne på hennes sextiofemte födelsedag, den 1 april 2020, har vänner och kollegor samlat texter som på olika sätt belyser kulturmötets viktiga roll i humaniora i allmänhet och litteraturvetenskap i synnerhet. Som alla kulturmöten är också denna bok en brokig samling. Materialet är hämtat från 1700-, 1800-, 1900- och 2000-talen, från böcker, filmer, scener, sånger och tidigare stängda arkiv, från Sverige, Frankrike, Tyskland och USA, från det offentliga livet och det privata.
Festskriften har redigerats av Amelie Björck, Eva Jonsson, Claudia Lindén och Mattias Pirholt, samtliga kollegor från litteraturämnet vid Södertörns högskola.
This collection maps out the current state of the field of literary and cultural animal studies in Northern Europe. With contributors from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, and Sweden, the work spans a wide variety of issues regarding human and non-human life in relation to different kinds of cultural expression, while others are more general in character. Above all others, one urgent and overarching question is addressed: How can we challenge the current anthropocentric paradigm in ways that benefit the production of less violent, more ethically sound and sustainable knowledge regarding the relationship between human and non-human life?
Ratatϙskr, in Norse mythology, is a squirrel that scurries up and down Yggdrasil (the tree of life), carrying messages between the dragon at its roots and the eagle at its top. Being a representation of a ‘real’ animal species, but also a part of the mythology organizing the human world, Ratatϙskr is ideally situated for literary and cultural animal studies. Apart from directing the scope of interest towards Northern Europe, this figure reminds us that the “squirrelling” and storage of productive and just knowledge about all forms of life is an important undertaking if there is to be a future for any of them.
An important task for scholars of cultural studies and the humanities, as well as for artistic creators, is to refigure the frames and concepts by which the world as we know it is kept in place. Without these acts of refiguration, the future could only ever be more of the (violent) same. In close dialogue with literary and cinematic works and practices, the essays of this volume help refigure and rethink such pressing contemporary issues as migration, inequality, racism, post-coloniality, political violence and human-animal relations. A range of fresh perspectives are introduced, amounting to a call for intellectuals to remain critically engaged with the social and planetary.