Animal narratives and culture
Subtitle: vulnerable realism
By: by Anna Barcz
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Published: 2017
Place of publication: Newcastle upon Tyne
Language: eng
Number of pages: 185
ISBN-13: 9781443827324
Subjects: Modern Literature; History and criticism; Realism in literature; Animals in literature
Description: The term "vulnerable realism" can imply two different understandings: one presenting weak realism as incomplete, and mixed with other literary styles; the other bringing realistic vulnerable experience into narration. The second is the key concern of this work, though it does not exclude the first, as it asks questions about realism as such, entering into a polemic with the tradition of literary realism. Realism, then, is not primarily understood as a narrative style, but as a narration that tests the probability of nonhuman vulnerable experience and makes it real. The book consists of three parts. The first presents examples of how realism has been redefined in trauma studies and how it may refer to animal experience. The second explores what is added to the narrative by literature, including the animal perspective (the zoonarrative) and how it is conducted (zoocriticism). The third analyses cultural texts, such as painting, circuses, and memorials, which realistically generate animal vulnerability and provide non-anthropocentric frameworks, anchoring our knowledge in the experience of fragile historical reality.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Part one: realism, referentiality, and the vulnerable; title: Redefining realism and new interpretative possibilities; title: The animal and the mute as a paradigm of the victim; title: Part two: zoonarrations; title: Posthumanism and its animal voices in literature; title: On D.H. Lawrence's "Snake" that slips out of the text: Derrida's reading of the poem; title: Introducing zoocriticism (a theory of animal narratives); title: Part three: the presence of animal vulnerability; title: Rembrandt's Slaughtered ox: the animal reference made present; title: Vulnerable animals in circuses: the animal side in Menagerie by Ferdynand Ossendowski; title: War memorials to animals from the Anthropocene Age; title: Epilogue.