What Is

Zoopoetics?
Texts, Bodies,
Entanglement

Edited by
Kári Driscoll &
Eva Hoffmann

Palgrave Studies in
Animals and Literature
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Series Editors
Susan McHugh
English Department
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA

Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of execut-
ing an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds
of human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal pres-
ences that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, soci-
ology and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad,
cross-disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the
separation of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and
political stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we
locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the
‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of
as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may
have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of
a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption
and to animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representa-
tions of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are convention-
ally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically
human concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of inter-
disciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with
the material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embod-
ying a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of
how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than
simply illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of
animals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with refer-
ence to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods.
The series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating
related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from
theatre and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other
cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages.

Series Board:
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649
 Kári Driscoll · Eva Hoffmann
Editors

What Is Zoopoetics?
Texts, Bodies, Entanglement
Editors
Kári Driscoll Eva Hoffmann
Utrecht University Whitman College
Utrecht, The Netherlands Walla Walla, WA, USA

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

ISBN 978-3-319-64415-8 ISBN 978-3-319-64416-5  (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64416-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948707

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Blue Whale Fluke - eco2drew/Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Contents

Introduction: What Is Zoopoetics? 1

Kári Driscoll and Eva Hoffmann

Prelude: I Observe with My Pen 15

Marcel Beyer

Part I  Texts

Hunting Narratives: Capturing the Lives of Animals 27

Nicolas Picard

“You Cannot Escape Your Moles”: The Becoming-Animal

of Günter Eich’s Late Literary Texts 45
Belinda Kleinhans

The Grammar of Zoopoetics: Human and Canine

Language Play 63
Joela Jacobs

v
vi  Contents

“‘Sire,’ says the fox”: The Zoopoetics and Zoopolitics

of the Fable in Kleist’s “On the Gradual Production
of Thoughts whilst Speaking” 81
Sebastian Schönbeck

Part II  Bodies

The Light That Therefore I Give (to): Paleonymy

and Animal Supplementarity in Clarice Lispector’s
The Apple in the Dark 103
Rodolfo Piskorski

“Constituents of a Chaos”: Whale Bodies and the

Zoopoetics of Moby-Dick 129
Michaela Castellanos

Queering the Interspecies Encounter: Yoko Tawada’s

Memoirs of a Polar Bear 149
Eva Hoffmann

Myth, Absence, Haunting: Toward a Zoopoetics

of Extinction 167
Paul Sheehan

Part III  Entanglement

Spinning Theory: Three Figures of Arachnopoetics 193

Matthias Preuss

Impersonal Love: Nightwood’s Poetics of Mournful

Entanglement 213
Peter J. Meedom
 Contents  vii

Between Encounter and Release: Animal Presences

in Two Contemporary American Poems 235
Ann Marie Thornburg

Heading South into Town: ipipipipipipip, ah yeah,

um, we’re gonna, yeah, ip 253
Catherine Clover

Coda: Speaking, Reading, Writing 271

Marcel Beyer

Index 275
 Notes on Contributors

Marcel Beyer  is an award-winning poet, novelist, and translator based in

Dresden, Germany. Three of his novels, Spies (2000), The Karnau Tapes
(1997), and Kaltenburg (2012) have been translated into English. He is
the recipient of numerous awards, including the Kleist Prize (2014) and
the Büchner Prize (2016).
Michaela Castellanos is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at
Mid Sweden University. Her research interests lie in animal studies, the
environmental humanities, and risk studies. She is the European editor
of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, a member of
the research network Cultural and Literary Animal Studies (CLAS), and
a member the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture,
and the Environment (EASLE).
Catherine Clover is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her mul-
tidisciplinary art practice explores an expanded approach to communi-
cation through voice and language and the interplay between hearing/
listening and seeing/reading. She teaches at Swinburne University (MA
Writing, BA Media), Melbourne, and RMIT University (BDes Interior
Design), Melbourne, and holds a practice led Ph.D. (Fine Art) through
RMIT University.
Kári Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at
Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He holds a Ph.D. (2014) in
German Language and Literature from Columbia University. He

ix
x  Notes on Contributors

has published on zoopoetics in the works of Franz Kafka, Hugo von

Hofmannsthal, and Luigi Pirandello. He is the coeditor of Book Presence
in a Digital Age (Bloomsbury 2018) 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 a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department
of German Studies and Gender Studies at Whitman College in Walla
Walla, WA. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Oregon at the
Department of German and Scandinavian, in 2017, and has a gradu-
ate 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.
Joela Jacobs is Assistant Professor of German studies at the University
of Arizona. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and works
on the intersection of German literature with animal studies, environ-
mental humanities, and Jewish studies. She has published articles on
monstrosity, multilingualism, literary censorship, biopolitics, animal
epistemology, critical plant studies, and contemporary German Jewish
identity. Her current book manuscript maps a microgenre of circa 1900
grotesque German literature that creatively animates nonhuman life-
forms to answer the question what it means to be human in the modern
world.
Belinda Kleinhans is Assistant Professor of German at Texas Tech
University. She received her Ph.D. in German from the University of
Waterloo (Ontario) in 2013. Her research interests are in the areas of
biopolitics in literature, cultural and literary animal studies, literary texts,
and the philosophy of language, and issues of representation. She has
mainly published in the field of cultural animal studies.
Peter J. Meedom teaches English and Comparative Literature at the
University of Oslo (Norway), where he earned his Ph.D. with a disser-
tation on the relationship between personal and impersonal life in the
works of Döblin, Jahnn, Giono, Céline, Barnes, and Woolf. He is editor
of the Scandinavian Journal of Nature Criticism, Ny Jord.
Nicolas Picard is a Ph.D. candidate in Francophone literature at the
Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III University (Joint Research Unit THALIM:
Paris III, CNRS, Ecole Normale Supérieure). His dissertation focuses on
zoopoetics in French literary prose (1896–1938).
 Notes on Contributors  xi

Rodolfo Piskorski  recently completed a Ph.D. in Critical and Cultural

Theory from Cardiff University, Wales and is currently University
Teacher in Portuguese at the School of Modern Languages there. His
research focuses on the interface between animality and textuality. His
work has appeared in The Journal of Literary Theory, Humanimalia, and
The Journal of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, among others.
Matthias Preuss  is a Ph.D. candidate with the DFG graduate program
“Das Dokumentarische. Exzess und Entzug” at the Ruhr-Universität
Bochum in Germany and is member of the researcher network for
Cultural and Literary Animal Studies (CLAS). He is currently examining
the documentation of environmental anomalies by exploring the poetic
strategies of early ecology as a nexus of biology, politics, and economy
as well as the epistemic strategies of realist and naturalist literature in the
last third of the nineteenth century.
Sebastian Schönbeck is a Ph.D. candidate at the Julius-Maximilians-
Universität Würzburg in Germany. He holds a scholarship of the German
Academic Scholarship Foundation and is currently working on his disser-
tation, entitled “Animals in the Poetics of Enlightenment.” His research
interests include German and French literature of the eighteenth and
nineteenth century, (literary) animal studies, environmental humanities,
genre theory, and deconstruction.
Paul Sheehan  is Associate Professor of English at Macquarie University,
Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Modernism, Narrative and
Humanism (Cambridge UP, 2002) and Modernism and the Aesthetics
of Violence (Cambridge UP, 2013), and coeditor of “The Uses of
Anachronism,” a special issue of Textual Practice (2012). Most recently
he has published essays on James Joyce, Cormac McCarthy, and posthu-
man bodies, and is currently working on a collaborative project entitled
Transnational Coetzee.
Ann Marie Thornburg holds an MFA in Poetry from the University
of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program where she was also a Zell
Postgraduate Fellow in Poetry. She was also a Human-Animal Studies
Fellow at Wesleyan University. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in
Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, investigating
human and free-ranging dog relations, focusing on questions of transi-
ence and mobility.