My dissertation brings together prose texts and poetry by four writers and poets, who published in German language at the beginning of the twentieth century: Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), and Georg Trakl (1887-1914). All four of these writers are concerned with the inadequacy of language and cognition, the so called Sprachkrise at the turn-of-the-century. In their texts, they challenge the ability of language to function as a means of communication, and as a way to express emotions or relate more deeply to the world. While it is widely recognized that this “crisis of identity” in modernist literature has been a crisis of language all along, I argue in my dissertation that the question of language is ultimately also a question of “the animal.” Other scholars have argued for animals’ poetic agency (e.g. Aaron M. Moe; Susan McHugh), or for the conceptual link between the “crisis of language” and the threat to human exceptionalism in the intellectual milieu of the early twentieth century (Kári Driscoll). My dissertation is the first study that explores the interconnection between Sprachkrise, animality, and the phenomenological philosophy of embodiment. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of phenomenology, I illustrate how Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Rilke and Trakl invoke the body as intertwined with animals in complex ways, and employ these animal figures to reconceptualize notions of language and specifically the metaphor. The authors, I argue, engage in a zoopoetic writing, as other forms of life participate as both symbolic and material bodies in the signifying processes. Moreover, I illustrate how their zoopoetic approach involve forms of intimacy and envision figures that fall outside heteronormative sexualities and ontologies, making the case for a queer zoopoetics in Modernist German literature.

Human animals have several very specific modes of relating with nonhuman animals. ANIMA, a body of work incorporating photographic and sculptural works, situates the viewer in two modes of relating: scientific and sympathetic. The photographs, which take on the mantel of the scientific, call into question the efficacy of rational, distanced and supposedly objective approaches to nonhuman animals. The very singular, interspecies creatures depicted, however, disrupt the solidity of this perspective on knowing. Three vulnerable and fantastical ‘deerhounds’ comprise the sculptural works. These absurdly plaintive creatures are embodiments of the consequences of a relating to nonhuman animals through infantilization and a dissolving of otherness. Through these works, and their relation to each other, the artist gestures to the possibility of alternate, ethical modes of relating. This thesis examines the limits of human language as a vehicle for apprehending nonhuman animals. It suggests that art, because of its often instinctive, provisional and affective relating, is a parallel and useful method to approaching animality. It proposes sustained and attentive relationships with individual animals as an avenue for moving beyond relationships of ‘massification’. Referencing writings from biologists, theorists, musicians and authors of fiction, as well as interspersing the text with short poetic vignettes, the author attempts to build an interdisciplinary approach to questioning what is ‘animal’, and why it has been defined as antithetical to ‘human’. ‘Heteroaffection’, ‘telepoiesis’, criticial anthropomorphism and sympathetic imagination are proposed as catalysts for an ethical way to be with, and to represent that being with, another animal. / October 2015

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.

This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge by exploring parliamentary left and anarchistic approaches to animal advocacy using a Critical Animal Studies (CAS) framework. This is significant because CAS is a field of scholarship which developed in order to theoretically support animal activists; nonetheless, in its focus on direct action and its rejection of reformist politics, CAS has too often ignored the legislative developments which are extremely important to most animal activists. Therefore, this thesis makes an overarching claim that CAS scholarship should treat the relationship between direct action and legislative reform more seriously. This thesis considers the relationship between direct action activists and legislative politics and as such makes a useful contribution to both CAS and wider animal rights scholarship. More broadly, the thesis provides a particularly useful assessment of one social movement at a time of rapidly changing moral, political and activist landscapes as Britain enters a new ‘age of dissent'.

Potential alliances between queers and animals populate queer scholarship, while dominant culture has relegated both groups to similar sites of subjugation and abjection. My work presents utopic visions crafted from these shared sites of marginalization and asks how they can enable new biopolitical communities. I ask: can we co-habitate, with non-human animals, these particular sites of marginalization in a manner that enables cross-species, affective solidarity? And can this co-habitation also encourage ruptures within heteronormative and human-centric paradigms? Rescuing the subjectivity and cultures of animals from extent subjugations can build new multispecies communities that are essential in an era of environmental devastation and climate change. Through printmaking, installation and time-based media, I explore real, psychological and metaphorical environments of cross-species encounters.

Despite growing academic interest in the human–animal relationship, little research has been directed toward the political regulation of animal treatment. Even less attention has been accorded to the emergence of the long dominant paradigm in this policy area, namely, the ideology of animal welfare. This book attempts to address this gap by chronicling the early history of animal politics in Sweden with the aim of producing a critical, deconstructive genealogy of animal cruelty and animal welfare. The study ranges from the first political debates about animal cruelty in 1844 to the institution of Sweden’s first comprehensive animal protection act in 1944. Taking a post-Marxist and psychoanalytically informed approach to discourse analysis, the study focuses on how the “problem” of animal cruelty was articulated in the parliamentary debates and government documents throughout the period: What was the problem of animal (mis)treatment represented to be? What kinds of animal (ab)use were rendered uncontroversial? What kind of affective investments and ideological fantasies underpinned these discursive constructions, and how did the problematizations change over time? The book contains six empirical chapters that deal with the most important legal revisions in the period as well as the parallel debates about animal experimentation and slaughter. Two major discursive regimes—an early “anti-cruelty regime” and a later “animal welfare regime”—are identified in the material, and the transition between them is theorized in terms of discursive antagonism and dislocation. Focusing on the conflict between competing discursive logics, the study charts a century of ideological struggles through which our modern attitudes toward animals were born. The book also offers a critical reinterpretation of the success story of animal welfare. Against the assumption that modern animal welfarism progressively grew out of the preceding anti-cruelty regime, the central claim of this book is that the “welfarist turn” that took place in the 1930s and 1940s also functioned to re-entrench society’s speciesist values and de-problematize the exploitation of animals for human purposes.

Animal slaughter has recently become highly visible in popular food media. This thesis interrogates the myths, assumptions and ideologies underlying this so-called New Carnivore movement, through critical analysis of a range of popular gastronomic texts. Socially-constructed ideas about ‘reality’, ‘sentimentality’, ‘sacrifice’, and ‘redemption’ are intimately implicated in the process of animal slaughter, as are the notions of ‘good taste’ and social distinction. The domination of animals, demonstrated through the slaughter, butchery, and consumption of nonhuman bodies, is held to be an integral component in the performance of gender, as well as a means of reconnecting, via a kind of secular epiphany, with ‘Nature’ at its most authentic. As a hostile backlash against the social progress made by the animal advocacy and vegetarian movements, New Carnivorism denigrates vegetarianism and veganism as outdated, unfashionable, unnatural, puritanical and rude. Although these texts’ potential to inspire farmed animal welfare reform should not be ignored, New Carnivorism ultimately serves to naturalize, justify and promote the continued consumption of meat, and the continued exploitation of nonhuman animals, in Western societies.

This thesis extrapolates upon theoretical examinations of meat consumption as linked to masculinity in order to consider how meat consumption may also be connected to dominant themes in Canada’s national foundation as marked by whiteness, multiculturalism, and post-coloniality. I investigate two sets of advertisements – Maple Leaf Canada’s “Feeding the Country” commercial, and Alberta Beef Producer’s Raised Right online campaign – through employing multimodal critical discourse analysis and tenets of Stuart Hall’s theories of representations. In doing so, I argue that meat consumption is depicted in advertising as an ideologically and symbolically loaded practice that seizes upon and re-articulates greater themes of Canadian national identity in a way that denotes the nation as having overcome its racial tensions and colonial history.

Animals as Laboratory Objects: Analysis of the Power Discourse PhDr. Tereza Vandrovcová Abstract This dissertation thesis encompasses a critical discourse analysis of the power correlates of expert knowledge and other factors that can hinder the open and unbiased discussion concerning the ethical aspects of the use of nonhuman animals in biomedical experiments. A brief history of "the animal" is first provided before the issue is positioned within the theoretical framework of Animal Studies. The fourth chapter is composed of an overview of the most frequent arguments both for and against the use of animals in biomedicine. The author draws upon her research as she analyzes scientific texts to reveal how laboratory animals are socially constructed as scientific objects and subsequently describes the effects this has on the perception of their moral value. A series of semi-structured interviews with critics and advocates of animal experimentation, such as animal rights activists and laboratory workers who conduct experiments on animals, is the pivotal section of the paper. It is established that lab workers in the sample are convinced of the necessity and legitimacy of current practices, that lab workers have a tendency to suppress animals' individuality when describing their work, that lab workers deem their...

This diploma thesis is inquired into the problematic of anthropocentrism and it' s relationship with the living nature. It is obvious that the anthropocentrism contributed to the current ecological crisis. The author is trying to delimit the definition framework of anthropocentrism and to find it's social, scientific even religious roots and to find the possible ways out of the crisis. The author also presents the key-concepts and theories that are non-anthropocentrically based and that are presenting the possible alternative attitude to the environment connected with the transformation of human values. Concretely it engages James Lovelocks Gaia Theory, Arne Naesses deep ecology and ecosophy or the Fritjof Capras new paradigm. Farther away it also follows the possibility of practical change of our life-concepts and as it's example describes the new concept of voluntary simplicity and New Age.