Description
Book SynopsisThe ways in which we represent animals say much about who we are, who we strive to be, and our often conflicting ideas about our relationships with nonhuman species. Whether the animal is seen as someone with whom we can relate and feel kinship or conceived of as the radical other, popular cultural descriptions of animals are often – if not always – indirect descriptions of ourselves. The contributions to this volume offer a unique panorama of academic and literary approaches, demonstrating that an analysis of cultural representations and constructions of animals is indispensable for a better understanding of the interface of human culture and the so-called animal world.
Table of ContentsMorten Tønnessen and Kadri Tüür: The semiotics of animal representations Part I: From Shepherding To Colonisation Louise Westling: The zoosemiotics of sheep herding with dogs David Rothenberg: Avian aesthetics: The representation of bird song from music to science Christos Lynteris: Speaking marmots, deaf hunters: Animal–human semiotic breakdown as the imagined cause of the Manchurian pneumonic plague of 1910–11 Part II: From Illustration To Show Adam Dodd: Entomological rhetoric and the fabrication of the insect world Larissa Budde: “Back on the menu”: Humans, insectoid aliens and the creation of ecophobia in science fiction Graham Huggan: Attenborough’s natural history films: The evolutionary epic Part III: From Life Writing To Nature Writing Taija Kaarlenkaski: Communicating with the cow: Human–animal interaction in written narratives Maki Eguchi: The representation of sheep in modern Japanese literature from Natsume Sōseki to Murakami Haruki Sandra Mänty: Animal representation in the Harry Potter series Kadri Tüür: Like a fish out of water: Literary representations of fish Part IV: From Mind To Value Wendy Wheeler: Thought without concepts in Angels and Insects: A.S. Byatt as crypto-biosemiotician W. John Coletta: A Peircean semiotic model for describing the anti-Oedipal structure of “humanimal” selves Ralph R. Acampora: The (proto-)ethical significance of semiosis: When and how does one become somebody who matters? List of contributors Index
