Figuring Animals Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture

by Pollock, Mary Sanders; Rainwater, Catherine

• ISBN13: 9781403965127
• ISBN10: 1403965129
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-01-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Figuring Animals is a collection of fifteen essays concerning the representation of animals in literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and cultural practice. At the turn of the new century, it is helpful to reconsider our inherited understandings of the species, some of which are still useful to us. It is also important to look ahead to new understandings and new dialogue, which may contribute to the survival of us all. The contributors to this volume participate in this dialogue in a variety of ways--through personal experience, natural history, cultural studies, philosophical inquiry, art history, literary analysis, film studies, and theoretical imagining, and through a combination of these trains of thought. The essays expose weaknesses in western epistemological frames of reference that for centuries have limited our views and, thus, our experiences of animal being, including our own.

Author Biography

Mary S. Pollock is Professor of English and Director of Women and Gender Studies at Stetson University.

Catherine Rainwater is Professor of English at St. Edward's University.

Table of Contents

Contributors	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction	1	(18)
Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater
Part I The Social Animal	19	(44)
1. Lost Dog, or, Levinas Faces the Animal	21	(16)
H. Peter Steeves
2. Ursus Americanus: The Idea of a Bear	37	(12)
Melanie Fox
3. Digging and Leveling in Adam's Garden: Women and the International Cat Fancy	49	(16)
Susan E. Jones
Part II The Observed and the Observer	63	(56)
4. Animal Testimony in Renaissance Art: Angelic and Other Supernatural Visitations	65	(16)
William J. Scheick
5. Strange Yet "Familiar": Cats and Birds in Remedios Varo's Artistic Universe	81	(18)
Nancy Vosburg
6. Who's Looking? The Animal Gaze in the Fiction of Brigitte Kronauer and Clarice Lispector	99	(22)
Jutta Ittner
Part III Art and Science	119	(42)
7. Burning Out the Animal: The Failure of Enlightenment Purification in H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau	121	(14)
Carrie Rohman
8. Ouida's Rhetoric of Empathy: A Case Study in Victorian Anti-Vivisection Narrative	135	(28)
Mary Sanders Pollock
Part IV Difference and Desire	161	(68)
9. The Black Stallion in Print and Film	163	(14)
Lindsay McLean Addison
10. "Who are the Bandar-log?" Questioning Animals in Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli Stories and Ursula Le Guin's "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight"	177	(18)
Christopher Powici
11. To the Other: The Animal and Desire in Michael Field's Whym Chow: Flame of Love	195	(12)
David Banash
12. "Identifying with the Animals": Language, Subjectivity, and the Animal Politics of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing	207	(22)
Robert McKay
Part V Theories of the Other	229	(52)
13. Sensory Experience as Consciousness in Literary Representations of Animal Minds	231	(16)
Julie A. Smith
14. Human-Animal Affiliation in Modern Popular Film	247	(14)
Tim Gadd
15. Who May Speak for the Animals? Deep Ecology in Linda Hogan's Power and A. A. Carr's Eye Killers	261	(20)
Catherine Rainwater
Index	281