What Is Zoopoetics? ― Texts, Bodies, Entanglement

This book brings together essays dealing with the question of zoopoetics both as an object of study—i.e. texts from various traditions and periods that reflect, explicitly or implicitly, on the relationship between animality, language and representation—and as a methodological problem for animal studies, and, indeed, for literary studies more generally. What can literary animal studies tell us about literature that conventional literary studies might be blind to? How can literary studies resist the tendency to press animals into symbolic service as metaphors and allegories for the human whilst also avoiding a naïve literalism with respect to the literary animal? The volume is divided into three sections: “Texts,” which focuses on the linguistic and metaphorical dimensions of zoopoetics; “Bodies,” which is primarily concerned with mimesis and questions of embodiment, performance, and lived experience; and “Entanglement,” which focuses on interspecies encounters and the complex interplay between word and world that emerges from them. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of animal studies, area studies and comparative literature, gender studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and the broader field of posthumanism. 

Kari Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, Netherlands. He holds a PhD (2014) in German Language and Literature from Columbia University. He has published on zoopoetics in the works of Franz Kafka, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Luigi Pirandello. He is the co-editor of Book Presence in a Digital Age (2017), 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 Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of German Studies and Gender Studies at Whitman College, WA, USA. She received her PhD at the University of Oregon at the Department of German and Scandinavian in 2017, and has a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Oregon. She has published articles on Franz Kafka, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Orhan Pamuk. She also translated Elsa Asenijeff’s collection of short stories, Innocence, into English.