No description available.

In recent years, there has been an undeniable shift in how we think about nonhuman animals. A growing philosophical literature on animal rights has encouraged a deep consideration of the moral status of animals, while scientific research has simultaneously confirmed the fact that many animals have complex cognitive, emotional, and social capacities that strongly mirror our own. Although there is still disagreement about what all this implies in terms of our responsibilities to animals, the idea that animals can experience physical or emotional pain or pleasure is the starting point and not the conclusion of the present inquiry. Many species of animals are sentient beings who possess a viewpoint from which they experience and act in the world around them - and hence may be said to be agential. My dissertation explores what it means for us to extend, conceptually and morally, agency to animals. I address this "extension of agency" predominantly from an aesthetic perspective, although in doing so I in no way intend to limit the range of related philosophical concerns. On the contrary; to extend agency to animals, I argue, calls for a revised understanding of our habitual spectatorial stances--how we look at animals. To grasp these stances, I investigate how animals have been looked at in literary works of art. Does the literature show our spectatorship to extend agency to animals or do we objectify them so as to deny their capacities as agents altogether? My dissertation focuses on excerpts from three significant works of literature--works by Nathanael West, Ernest Hemingway, and Leo Tolstoy--each of which stages a specifically athletic engagement involving animals, in this way bringing focus to the issue of our spectatorship. Each excerpt serves as philosophically illuminating material and as an exemplary case regarding humanity's willingness or refusal to extend agency to animals. I am particularly interested in the role of animals in human-engineered sports, and in how extending agency to animals in sports changes or ought to change the way we watch sports that involve animals. Within the philosophy of sport, the accepted approach has been to liken animals to sporting equipment or tools, and thus to make no substantive distinction between animal and non-animal sports. This, I argue, reflects a refusal to extend agency to animals, which has led also to an oversimplification and mischaracterization of sports involving animals in the first place. Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust takes up cockfighting, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises centers around bullfighting, and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina includes a memorable, emotionally stirring, steeplechase episode. In addition to investigating what I refer to as the "extension of agency" to animals in these literary works, I revise some of the basic assumptions that have recently guided the burgeoning subfield of the philosophy of sports. I argue that we must acknowledge that there exists a fundamental difference between the modes of spectatorship that accompany sports that only involve humans, and those that involve animals. For to extend agency is to extend the moral domain to that or those who are "other" than ourselves. Once animals are introduced into a sport, they imbue the sport with all the aesthetic complexities that come with looking at an animal outside of sport: the unique exotic beauty of the animal body and its fitness to function, but also its vitality, wild autonomy, expressiveness, and reciprocity of gaze. This means that our interactions with animals, even in the case of organized sport or performance, are not purely aesthetic in a formal artistic sense; they are also expressive and communicative. The concept of the formal aesthetic that many employ when talking about art - the formal qualities that we attribute to the arts - is not sufficient to accommodate sports that involve animals and a spectatorship of animals. Animals are expressive, and this expressiveness is fundamental to correctly understanding our spectatorship of them. Animals are far more than our equipment. The aesthetic of animal sports must, I conclude, accordingly incorporate expressiveness and empathy, such that we see animals in fellowship with us as participants in sports. Extending agency to animals is the core concept of a morally inflected aesthetic of inter-subjectivity.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-87).

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-09-19T10:19:30Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Eliana de Castro.pdf: 786815 bytes, checksum: 3b61ffb2f9bfea8827bb1f27780a45a0 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-09-19T10:19:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Eliana de Castro.pdf: 786815 bytes, checksum: 3b61ffb2f9bfea8827bb1f27780a45a0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-08-21 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This research intends to analyze the novel Anna Kariênina, by the Russian writer Liev Tolstoy, in the light of Romanticism and orthodox Christianity, specifically the question of adultery and romantic love, which ends up leading the protagonist to suicide. We deal with the importance of literature since the earliest times, especially how through literature it is possible to get in touch with the religious customs of a nation, that is, their worldview. We create a panorama of the romantic movement and its influence in literature, just as we present the new way of seeing and living the religion that has been given by the historical romantics; beyond, of course, the very conception of romantic love, which dates back to this period. We observe Tolstoy as a religious agent, passing through his main body of work, thus arriving at the question of the desire that, in the end, closes the research in a detailed analysis of the work, which certainly serves the whole theoretical path. / Esta pesquisa pretende analisar o romance Anna Kariênina, do escritor russo Liev Tolstói, à luz do Romantismo e do cristianismo ortodoxo, especificamente a questão do adultério e do amor romântico, o que acaba por levar a protagonista ao suicídio. Tratamos a importância da literatura desde os tempos mais remotos, principalmente como por meio da literatura é possível entrar em contato com os costumes religiosos de um povo, ou seja, sua cosmovisão. Tecemos um panorama do movimento romântico e sua influência na literatura, da mesma forma como apresentamos a nova maneira de ver e viver a religião que se deu a partir dos românticos históricos; além, claro, da própria concepção de amor romântico, que data desse período. Observamos Tolstói como um agente religioso, perpassando suas principais obras, chegando assim na questão do desejo que, por fim, encerra a pesquisa numa análise detalhada da obra, que se serve, certamente, de todo o caminho teórico percorrido.

This dissertation argues that Russia’s confrontation with modernity generated a series of sociocultural paradigm crises that gave rise to a modernist grotesque aesthetic tradition, uniting over forty years of artistic production into a coherent literary movement. While close reading the work of Fyodor Sologub (The Petty Demon [Мелкий бес]), Andrei Bely (Petersburg [Петербург]), Evgenii Zamyatin (At World’s End [На куличках]), and Velimir Khlebnikov (“The Crane” [Журавль]), I argue that prerevolutionary modernist writers utilized grotesque modes of representation to depict a world where the former cornerstones of pre-modern Russian identity are fracturing under the pressures of modernity. In contrast to extant scholarship, I argue the 1917 Revolution is not a fundamental break in Russia’s experience of the crisis of modernity, but an extension, and an exacerbation of it. Though discourses of Russian identity formation will be rapidly recodified around the Soviet project, the same underlying grotesque aesthetic devices used by pre-revolutionary authors are taken up by a new generation of Soviet-era modernists. Mikhail Zoshchenko’s parody in Michel Sinyagin (Мишель Синягин) elicits skepticism about yesterday’s unenlightened masses becoming today’s new Tolstoys. Andrei Platonov’s anomalous depictions of the Russian periphery in his Juvenile Sea (Ювенильное море) are still inhabited by monsters, too far from Soviet nodes of power to be assimilated into the national ideological project. And Konstantin Vaginov (in the novel Goat Song [Козлиная песнь]) and Evgenii Shvarts (in the play The Shadow [Тень]) capture the prevalence of superfluous intellectuals with ruptured psyches, frustrated by their unsuccessful attempts to adapt to the new Soviet reality.