Articles by Barbara Fraipont
This article aims to highlight the yet unexplored zoopoetical relation of the Dutch writer and ar... more This article aims to highlight the yet unexplored zoopoetical relation of the Dutch writer and artist Charlotte Mutsaers (1942-) to the famous animal fables of Jean de la Fontaine. A couple of important animal configurations will be identified in Mutsaers’s work through the analysis of animal discursive devices and metamorphoses in La Fontaine. In this respect, La Fontaine’s fable ‘La Chatte métamorphosée en femme’ (‘The cat metamorphosed into a woman’) (1688-1693) will be compared with Mutsaers’s novel Koetsier Herfst (2008). The literary-philosophical frameworks of metamorphosis and hybridity as well as the becoming-animal motif, drawn from research in the Cultural and Literary Animal Studies (CLAS), will prove useful to show how animal aspects in Mutsaers and La Fontaine relate to each other and correlate with different political discourses about the animal. The analysed creative and discursive human-animal patterns in Mutsaers’s and La Fontaine’s texts set out significant social-philosophical reversals of perspective about the animal-human bond and shed new light on Mutsaers’s artistic practice.
Charlotte Mutsaers’ essayistic and literary work displays a complex relation to Kafka’s animal wr... more Charlotte Mutsaers’ essayistic and literary work displays a complex relation to Kafka’s animal writing. While Mutsaers often refers in her work to Kafka’s animal texts, she also distances herself from Kafka’s representation of a ‘becoming-animal’ in his short story Die Verwandlung (1912). In order to better understand Mutsaers’ relation to Kafka and to gain insight into the underlying animal poetics and politics of the Dutch author, this article focuses on Mutsaers’ novel Rachels Rokje (1994). Using the framework of the Cultural and Literary Animal Studies (CLAS) and Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking on animality, it shows how Mutsaers both deterritorialises and reterritorialises Kafka’s animals in her novel. By referring to a zoe-approach as defined by Braidotti (2011), this article argues that Mutsaers’ zoopoetics not only occurs in a playful manner, but also in a biopolitical perspective in which a form of affinity and egalitarianism between species is put forward.
Talks by Barbara Fraipont
"Webinaire « Unlimited : penser, dépasser, effacer les limites en littératures »" (01/10/2020), 2020
"Eigenzinnig en volks. De romans van Walter van den Broeck. 0pen studiedag over het werk van Walter van den Broeck", Gent (13/09/2019), 2019
Nederlands in Beweging: 20ste Colloquium Neerlandicum (Leuven, 29/08/2018), 2018
http://www.achterdeverhalen.nl/abstracts/
In this contribution I would like to consider criticism of popular animal imagery and in particul... more In this contribution I would like to consider criticism of popular animal imagery and in particular of Walt Disney-animals from a literary and aesthetic perspective. The well-known Dutch writer and artist Charlotte Mutsaers (1942) voices for instance critical opinions about Walt Disney in one of her essays. Many figures ‘such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and the Bad Wolf’ which she had been attracted to as a child are according to her sadly just bland humans in animal form (Seapine, 1999: 173). This statement is also to be found in other texts of Mutsaers and in her series of paintings The Beauty and the Beast. How do these references to popular art in Mutsaers’s work throw into question some cultural representations of the animal? And, how do these intertexts and her own zoopoetics shed new light on recent developments in the way of approaching the animal? These questions will be addressed both from a philosophical viewpoint and from recent Human-Animal paradigms. Steve Baker’s views on anthropomorphism (1993) and Kari Weil’s concept of ‘critical anthropomorphism’ (2012) will be discussed. In parallel with these strategies of ‘feeling for’ and seeing the animal, the notions of ‘animal gaze’ by Jacques Derrida (2006) and of ‘the open’ of the animal by Giorgio Agamben (2002) will also be considered. By an intertextual, c.q. intermedial, and both philosophical as political approach, this contribution aims - starting from Mutsaers’s artistic practice - to gain insight into zoopoetical configurations with respect to figurative and performative animals.
Papers by Barbara Fraipont
Charlotte Mutsaers’ essayistic and literary work displays a complex relation to Kafka’s animal wr... more Charlotte Mutsaers’ essayistic and literary work displays a complex relation to Kafka’s animal writing. While Mutsaers often refers in her work to Kafka’s animal texts, she also distances herself from Kafka’s representation of a ‘becoming-animal’ in his short story Die Verwandlung (1912). In order to better understand Mutsaers’ relation to Kafka and to gain insight into the underlying animal poetics and politics of the Dutch author, this article focuses on Mutsaers’ novel Rachels Rokje (1994). Using the framework of the Cultural and Literary Animal Studies (CLAS) and Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking on animality, it shows how Mutsaers both deterritorialises and reterritorialises Kafka’s animals in her novel. By referring to a zoe -approach as defined by Braidotti (2011), this article argues that Mutsaers’ zoopoetics not only occurs in a playful manner, but also in a biopolitical perspective in which a form of affinity and egalitarianism between species is put forward.
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Articles by Barbara Fraipont
Talks by Barbara Fraipont
Papers by Barbara Fraipont
De bijdragen in dit boek onderstrepen de noodzaak van omdenken’. Het komt erop aan onze obsessie met het puur menselijk bestaan en bewustzijn te doorbreken.
Albert Schweitzer formuleerde het zo: ‘ik ben leven dat leven wil, te midden van leven dat leven wil’. Hij was de vroege voorloper van een sensibiliteit die zich in onze tijd bij veel mensen laat zien. Hoe krijgt die vorm in de kunst en literatuur, en in religie en de filosofie?