Posthumanist rhetoric is informed by developments in the sciences and the humanities which suggest that mind and body are not distinct from each other and, therefore, claims of humans’ superiority over other animals based on cognitive differences may not be justified. Posthumanist rhetoric, then, seeks to re-imagine the human and its relationship to the world. Though “post-” implies after, like other “post-” terms, posthumanism also coexists with humanism. This dissertation develops a concept of posthumanist rhetoric as questioning humanist assumptions about subjectivity while remaining entangled in them. The destabilization of the human subject means that new identifications between humans and nonhumans are possible, and the ethical implications of the rhetorical strategies used to build them have yet to be worked out. Identification, a key aim of rhetoric in the theory of Kenneth Burke and others, can persuade an audience to value others. However, it can also obscure the realities of who does and does not benefit from particular arguments, particularly when animal suffering is framed as human-like trauma with psychological and cultural as well as physical effects. I argue that a posthumanist practice of rhetoric demonstrates ways of circumventing this problem by persuading readers not only to care about others, but also to understand that our ability to comprehend another’s subjectivity is limited and that acknowledging these limitations is a method of caring. his dissertation locates instances of resistance to and/or deployment of posthumanist critique in recent works of literature; identifies language commonly used in appeals that create identifications between humans and animals; and analyzes the implications of these rhetorical strategies. To that end, I have selected texts about human and animal suffering that engage particular themes of identification that recur in posthumanist rhetoric. The chapters pair texts that develop each theme differently. Most undermine human superiority as a species, but many reify the importance of certain qualities of the liberal humanist subject by granting them to nonhumans. The points of identification created between humans and nonhumans will inform how we re-imagine the human subject to account for our connections, and therefore our responsibilities, to other beings.

Ce travail de recherche porte sur les liens qu'entretiennent l'animal et la mode, au prisme d'une étude iconographique orientée par une approche pluridisciplinaire. Entre fascination et paradoxes, la mise à contribution de l'animal et de ses attributs – physiques, graphiques, symboliques – sert d'abord les productions matérielles et immatérielles de la mode : les bêtes participent aux stratégies de transfiguration du réel propres à ce secteur économique singulier. Dans le même mouvement, le recours à l'animal apparaît aussi comme le relais esthétisé de représentations normées ; il devient un prétexte pour penser le monde, la nature humaine et ses rapports sociaux. Ainsi, tout en suivant la dynamique contemporaine d'engouement pour une Wilderness fantasmée, l'iconographie de la mode participe aux réécritures actuelles de ce qui fait l'humain. Néanmoins, les images de mode jouent un rôle dans les réévaluations et les négociations croissantes des frontières qui séparent les membres du vivant. En développant un travail spécifique autour du corps et de ses parures, elles proposent une voie alternative pour reconsidérer une altérité animale aux contours de plus en plus poreux. Il s'agit donc d'observer comment les formes visuelles de la mode et de son imaginaire traduisent la complexité de relations anthropozoologiques contemporaines en pleine mutation. / This research explores the connections between fashion and the animal, by means of an iconographic study guided by a multidisciplinary approach. Raising fascination and paradoxes, the use of the animal and its attributes – physical, graphical, symbolic – benefits, in the first place, material and symbolic fashion’s productions : animals are involved in the transfiguration-of-reality strategies peculiar to the unique economic sector that is fashion industry. At the same time, animals appear to be an efficient and aesthetic way of representing human activity : they are a tool to rethink the world, human nature and social relationships. Thus, involved in the general contemporary dynamics of keen interest for a fantasized Wilderness, the fashion iconography contributes to the current rewriting of human definition. Nevertheless, fashion pictures play a part in the growing negotiation of boundaries between members of the biological field. By developing a specific work on the human body an its fineries, they offer an alternative path to the reconsideration of an animal otherness whose borders seem more permeable everyday. This work is an attempt to examine how fashion's visual forms and imaginary express the contemporary complexity of far-changing anthropozoologic interactions.

Research has revealed that current antidepressant treatment is less than adequate at alleviating behavioral endophenotypes associated with major depressive disorder (MDD) and there is a need for appropriate animal models to validate novel antidepressant pharmacological targets. In the present study, we wished to establish an ethologically relevant social defeat stress model in combination with a chronic unpredictable stress model, to more accurately mimic severe stress that is common in MDD. Before each day of the introduction of the stressor, animals were given saline or a 40 mg/kg dose of 3-aminobenzamide (3-AB), a poly ADP-ribose (PARP) inhibitor. PARP is a DNA repair enzyme that is increased in activity in response to DNA oxidation, which is elevated in the prefrontal cortical white matter in MDD post-mortem donors. One stressed group was given the common antidepressant fluoxetine (10mg/kg) to serve as a positive control. Results of this study demonstrated that 3-AB alleviated decreases in sucrose preference, a natural reward, along with avoidance on a social interaction test given at the end of social defeat. Preliminary telemetry readings indicated 3-AB was able to significantly decrease heart rate and blood pressure in response to SDS as compared to saline treated rats. Therefore, it appears that PARP inhibition alleviated behavioral endophenotypes associated with stress and represents a new pharmacological treatment for MDD in humans.

A group of four captive bobcats (Felis rufus), two males and two females, was observed for 102.67 hours over the period of one year. A pilot study was conducted consisting of a minimum of three separate observations for each daylight hour. The remaining observations were concentrated during the early morning hours immediately after feeding, the time of maximum activity and social interaction.

In this thesis I perform a canine-centric reading, within the theoretical frame of Critical Animal Studies, of nine ‘dog narratives’ from the last three decades – that is, novels in which dogs and human-canine relationships are central to the story. While the novels differ from each other in numerous and substantial ways, they share a common trait: a conduciveness to the examination of tensions, paradoxes and contradictions inherent to the human-canine bond as it exists in Western culture. Each chapter centres on a key motif present in various groupings of four of the selected novels: human and canine interspecies communication; the socio-cultural categorisation of dogs; and the dual role of the domesticated dog as a device in life and literature. Just as Western cultural attitudes, overt and implicit, arise in these dog narratives in turn, these dog narratives provide valuable insight into our contradictory perceptions and subsequent treatment of dogs bred to serve as companions. Dog narratives present us with an opportunity to examine and critique some of the assumptions made about dogs – assumptions that result in their paradoxical status in Western culture. While some dog narratives reinforce the belief that human language privileges the human species, others undermine this claim by privileging canine forms of language and through depicting human language as problematic or as overrated as a means of communication. Authors of dog narratives utilise conflict stemming from opposing views of dogs’ subject/object categorisation in Western culture to challenge the deleterious object status of dogs. Most, if not all, dogs depicted in dog narratives are devices to facilitate the conveyance of stories primarily concerned with human experiences; nevertheless, authors of dog narratives can and do find efficient ways to challenge and question reductive representations of dogs. By utilising techniques such as point of view, characterisation and the itinerancy trope, and by creatively and effectively imagining their way into the canine mind, many authors of dog narratives bestow a canine identity upon the dogs they depict, which challenges our ability to view and treat dogs with detached objectivity and, in doing so, they offer more positive representations of the literary canine companion.

Detta examensarbete behandlar fenomenet att använda djurkroppar som material. Studiens syfte är att undersöka fenomenet döda djur och djurkroppar i konst, hantverk och design, och lyfta fram på vilket sätt döda djur används och hur användandet kan tolkas och förstås. Teorin belyser relationen djur och människa ur historiskt perspektiv, hur djur framställts inom konsten, samt den etiska aspekten. Metod och material består i en analys utifrån texter och medier, och en kvalitativ intervju med Märta Mattsson, som skapar smycken av främst insekter. Studien visar på att djur har varit symbol för många olika saker som mod, tapperhet, häxkonst och erotik. I analysen lyfts det fram att symbolik, spänning på gränsen till skräck, är betydande både ur historisk synvinkel och våra dagar och att djurkroppar som material kan ge just dessa känslor. Användandet av riktiga djur är ett sätt för konstnären att visa att det faktiskt är på allvar, att det är på liv och död, och det kan för vissa verk vara betydelsefullt att det är på riktigt. Studien visar att djurkroppar som material uppvisar stor variation, från vackra blommor av könsdelar från rådjur till torkade flugor med problem i äktenskapet. En djurkropp kan även vara ett starkt material för att förmedla känslor om döden och tankarna kring detta

Thesis (M.Anim.Sc) - University of Queensland, 2005. / Includes bibliography.

Ghost, Animal, Android: Trauma, Posthuman Ethics, and Radical Vulnerability in American Literature, 1940-2010 The dissertation argues that the literary topoi of the ghost, animal, and android function as ethical categories offering access to traces of trauma that operate beyond the boundaries of the human. The study revises the traditional argument that the literatures of trauma work to heal the victims of personal and cultural catastrophes by emphasizing work by William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, William Heyen, and Philip K. Dick that resists an oversimplified notion of healing and instead experiments with nonhuman models of subjectivity as means through which to manage open wounds. Able to register traumatic events at the very edge of understanding, canonical and popular depictions of the ghost, animal, and android disturb readers into an ethics of radical vulnerability, encouraging them to cross subjective and cultural thresholds and become vulnerable to the present but elusive pain of others.

En abordant les problèmes que pose l’apparence animale à la philosophie, ce travail a pour objectif de défendre une approche esthétique du vivant au sein même de la biologie. L’œuvre morphologique d’Adolf Portmann et celle, étho-écologique, de Jakob von Uexküll permettent de poser des questions majeures à l’histoire de la philosophie des sciences en abordant les différentes épistémologies et métaphysiques impliquées par l’étude des formes animales sur une période allant de la modernité à l’époque contemporaine. Afin de sortir du fonctionnalisme néo-darwinien qui oriente les critères d’objectivité aujourd’hui largement partagés par la communauté scientifique, nous avons argumenté en faveur de la nécessité pour la biologie de valoriser une approche empirique de la nature en renouant avec une zoologie trop souvent envisagée comme une discipline obsolète. / Doctorat en Philosophie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between important intellectual discourses of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries and the ontological status of non-human animals. The Enlightenment marks a distinct change in the ways in which humans gather knowledge and interact with the world, a change that forms the foundation for modern relationships between human and non-human animals. Through a theoretical framework that draws from animal studies and ecofeminism, I analyze the ways in which the status of non-human animals is shaped by the intersection of multiple anthropocentric concerns. In doing so, this dissertation probes the foundation of what defines the animal apart from the human. I use the metaphor of the chain of being to chart the relative ontological status of animals across multiple discursive paradigms and literary texts. The first chapter explores animal status within the changing epistemology of the Enlightenment. As humans rely on a combination of reason and sensory perceptions to know and describe the world, human reason becomes the source of human specialness and superiority. Rochester’s A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind questions the privileged status claimed by humans based upon the lauding of reason. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko exposes the complex ramifications for animal status within a narrative that relies on sensory perceptions for its truth-making strategy. The next chapter analyzes animal status in relation to human aspiration. Pope’s Essay on Man urges humans to use their reason to restrain their ambitions. This results in a relatively secure ontological status for animals. However, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe celebrates human ambition, which results in a lower and more tenuous status for animals. I then turn to the status of animals within the emergence of natural philosophy. Plays by Shadwell and Centlivre include virtuosi, who act as comic practitioners of the new science. Though the plays use science as a source of comedy, they reinforce the strict species hierarchy that rests at the heart of Baconian science. The analysis then turns to Thomson’s The Seasons, which employs natural philosophy in a manner that establishes a more egalitarian relationship between human and non-human animals. The final chapter analyzes the ways in which Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels imbricates each of the three discourses discussed in the previous chapters. The overarching trend that emerges throughout this research is that in texts that celebrate the human and human potential, animals occupy a much lower status relative to humans. In texts where human nature and behavior are met with skepticism or downright pessimism, the distance between human and animal shrinks, and animals occupy a relative status that is higher than in more anthropocentrically optimistic texts.