Edited Volumes by Kári Driscoll
This book brings together essays dealing with the question of zoopoetics both as an object of stu... more This book brings together essays dealing with the question of zoopoetics both as an object of study—i.e. texts from various traditions and periods that reflect, explicitly or implicitly, on the relationship between animality, language and representation—and as a methodological problem for animal studies, and, indeed, for literary studies more generally. What can literary animal studies tell us about literature that conventional literary studies might be blind to? How can literary studies resist the tendency to press animals into symbolic service as metaphors and allegories for the human whilst also avoiding a naïve literalism with respect to the literary animal? The volume is divided into three sections: “Texts,” which focuses on the linguistic and metaphorical dimensions of zoopoetics; “Bodies,” which is primarily concerned with mimesis and questions of embodiment, performance, and lived experience; and “Entanglement,” which focuses on interspecies encounters and the complex interplay between word and world that emerges from them. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of animal studies, area studies and comparative literature, gender studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and the broader field of posthumanism.
Contrary to the apocalyptic pronouncements of paper media's imminent demise in the digital age, t... more Contrary to the apocalyptic pronouncements of paper media's imminent demise in the digital age, there has been a veritable surge of creative reimaginings of books as bearers of the literary. From typographic experiments (Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts) to accordion books (Anne Carson's Nox), from cut ups (Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes) to collages (Graham Rawle's Woman's World), from erasures (Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow) to mixups (Simon Morris's The Interpretations of Dreams), print literature has gone through anything but a slow, inevitable death. In fact, it has re-invented itself materially.
Starting from this idea of media plurality, Book Presence in a Digital Age explores the resilience of print literatures, book art, and zines in the late age of print from a contemporary perspective, while incorporating longer-term views on media archeology and media change. Even as it focuses on the materiality of books and literary writing in the present, Book Presence also takes into consideration earlier 20th-century "moments" of media transition, developing the concepts of presence and materiality as analytical tools to perform literary criticism in a digital age. Bringing together leading scholars, artists, and publishers, Book Presence in a Digital Age offers a variety of perspectives on the past, present, and future of the book as medium, the complex relationship of materiality to virtuality, and of the analog to the digital.
In recent years, a number of publications devoted to the ‘future of memory’ have charted the pote... more In recent years, a number of publications devoted to the ‘future of memory’ have charted the potentials and limitations of the field of memory studies as it enters the Twenty-First Century. The field has seen a trajectory from ‘sites’ to ‘dynamics’ of memory, from national to transnational and ‘multidirectional’, from collective to cultural to transcultural memory. A series of critiques have shaken some of the field’s foundations, for example the universalization of victimhood, or the (Western-centered) concept of trauma. The ‘posthumanist turn’ in the humanities and social sciences has so far not made a significant impact on the field, however. This is no doubt due to the fact that, perhaps more so than any other recent field, memory studies has been fundamentally committed to a liberal humanist conception of the subject. Emerging as it did in response to the dehumanizing experience of WWII and the Holocaust, it is perhaps not surprising that the question “if this is a man” (Primo Levi) should have been a crucial concern for the field. It was important that this question be answered in the affirmative. But this also meant that the identity and constitution of the human could not at the same time be called into question. In light of poststructuralist and posthumanist critiques of the subject, however, it has become clear that the answer to this question is much more radically indeterminable. How can this indeterminability be made productive for a critical re-evaluation of the field of memory studies? What would a posthumanist memory studies look like? Who or what is the subject, and who or what is the object, of memory studies? What, in short, is memory studies the study of? In order to explore these and related questions, the contributions to this special issue bring memory studies into conversation with the fields of posthumanism, disability studies, animal studies, ecocriticism, new materialism, feminism, and critical race studies. The issue features a combination of full-length essays and short responses or ‘position papers’ by leading scholars and early career academics in these diverse fields.
Journal Articles by Kári Driscoll
Textual Practice, 2023
This article explores the implications of the recent proliferation of 'zoo-break' narratives in r... more This article explores the implications of the recent proliferation of 'zoo-break' narratives in relation to the discourse on the Anthropocene and the figure of the sacrifice zone in particular. Taking the zoo cage as a manifestation of what Agamben calls the 'inclusive exclusion' of zoē within bíos, and hence of the sacrificial logic that constitutes the human subject at the expense of the animal, the article explores how in these ‘zoo-break’ narratives, the biopolitical framework breaks down, and how they lay bare the sacrificial logic of human exceptionalism. Focusing especially on the figure of the zoo-in-wartime, the article investigates how this sacrificial logic operates and asks how we might reframe these zoo-break narratives as productive sites for representing and reflecting on history and violence in a more-than-human sense. The article concludes by arguing that the figure of the zoo-in-wartime can also be read as a ‘frame of war’ (Butler) in which both human and nonhuman lives become grievable, but only if we engage in a mode of reading that resists the instrumentalising, extractivist logic of the sacrifice zone.
The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 2021
In 2019, a new strategy in wildlife conservation was announced: so-called “rhino impact bonds,” d... more In 2019, a new strategy in wildlife conservation was announced: so-called “rhino impact bonds,” designed to support the conservation of African black rhinos, with the ultimate aim of establishing a global “conservation debt market.” This essay takes this development in the financialization of wildlife conservation as an object lesson in the mutual imbrication of guilt, debt, and the (non)human in the age of the Anthropocene. To this end, it traces a theoretical trajectory that explicitly frames the figure of “Man” in terms of Schuld, starting with Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. The essay takes Nietzsche’s “sovereign individual” to refer not to the human species as a whole but rather a specific “genre” of the human, namely what Sylvia Wynter calls homo oeconomicus. In “overrepresenting” himself as the paradigmatic human, this figure has established capital accumulation as the goal of all human life. From here, the essay turns to Walter Benjamin’s characterization of capitalism as a religion whose ultimate aim is not salvation but universal debt/guilt, and finally to Adorno’s account of nature conservation as domination. The rhino bonds represent the logical consequence of this trajectory, namely the expansion of the principle of universal debt to the entire natural world.
Vooys: Tijdschrift voor letteren, 2020
In dit artikel analyseert letterkundige Kári Driscoll het korte verhaal 'Axolotl' van Julio Cortá... more In dit artikel analyseert letterkundige Kári Driscoll het korte verhaal 'Axolotl' van Julio Cortázar vanuit het perspectief van animal studies, specifiek het veld van de zoöpoëtica. Na een korte definitie van dit veld dat zich begeeft op het kruispunt tussen filosofie en literatuur volgt een zoöpoëtische lezing. Deze legt zich toe op de versmelting van taal en materie in de totstandkoming van relationele betekenissen van mensen en andere dieren, specifiek de axolotl. Via deze vorm van analyse en leeswijze komt de focus op het verband tussen betekenis en materie te liggen en worden schrijver en axolotl co-auteurs in de totstandkoming van zowel tekst als daarbuiten liggende werkelijkheid. Dit draagt een kanteling van het antropocentrisch wereldbeeld in zich mee.
Frame: Journal of Literary Studies, 2018
This essay conducts a zoopoetic reading of Rainer Maria Rilke's iconic poem " Der Panther. " It p... more This essay conducts a zoopoetic reading of Rainer Maria Rilke's iconic poem " Der Panther. " It proceeds in three stages: first, I show how the text itself is zoopoetic, that is, projects a model of poiesis that proceeds via embodied animality. Second, I show how it implicates the reader in the zoopoetic process. In this way zoopoetics becomes not only a mode of artistic production but also one of reception. Finally, I reflect on what it means to read zoopoetically in the age of the Anthropocene.
Humanities, 2017
In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida wonders whether it would be possible to think of the d... more In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida wonders whether it would be possible to think of the discourse of the animal in musical terms, and if so, whether one could change the key, or the tone of the music, by inserting a “flat”—a “blue note” in other words. The task would be to render audible “an unheard language or music” that would be “somewhat inhuman” but a language nonetheless. This essay pursues this intriguing proposition by means of a reading Kafka’s “Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk,” paying careful attention to the controversy regarding the status of Josephine’s vocalizations, which, moreover, is mirrored in the scientific discourse surrounding the ultrasonic songs of mice. What is at stake in rendering this inhuman music audible? And furthermore, how might we relate this debate to questions of narrative and above all to the concept of narrative “voice”? I explore these and related questions via a series of theoretical waypoints, including Paul Sheehan, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, with a view to establishing some of the critical parameters of an “animal narratology,” and of zoopoetics more generally.
Journal of Literary Theory, Sep 2015
Sometime around 1900, a fundamental shift occurred in the way animals were represented in works o... more Sometime around 1900, a fundamental shift occurred in the way animals were represented in works of Western literature, art, and philosophy. Authors began to write about animals in a way that was unheard-of or even unimaginable in previous epochs. Traditionally, animals had fulfilled a symbolic, allegorical, or satirical function. But in the period around the turn of the twentieth century these animals begin, as it were, to »misbehave« or to »resist« the metaphorical values attributed to them. There is a conspicuous abundance of animals in the literature of this period, and this animal presence is frequently characterised by a profound and troubling ambiguity, which is often more or less explicitly linked to the problem of writing, representation, and language – specifically poetic or metaphorical language.Taking the Austrian literary scholar Oskar Walzel’s 1918 essay »Neue Dichtung vom Tiere« as its starting point, this essay explores the historical and philosophicalbackground of this paradigm shift as well as its implications for the study of animals in literature more generally. Zoopoetics is both an object of study in its own right and a specific methodological and disciplinary problem for literary animal studies: what can the study of animals can contribute to literary studies and vice versa? What can literary animal studies tell us about literature that conventional literary studies might otherwise be blind to? Although animals abound in the literature of almost every geographical area and historical period, traditional literary criticism has been marked by the tendency to disregard this ubiquitous animal presence in literary texts, or else a single-minded determination to read animals exclusively as metaphors and symbols for something else, in short as »animal imagery«, which, as Margot Norris writes, »presupposes the use of the concrete to express the abstract, and indeed, it seem[s] that nowhere in literature [are] animals to be allowed to be themselves« (Norris 1985, 17). But what does it mean for literary theory and criticism to allow animals to »be themselves«? Is it possible to resist the tendency to press animals »into symbolic service« (ibid.) as metaphors and allegories for the human, whilst also avoiding a naïve literalism with respect to the literary animal?The pervasive uneasiness regarding the metaphorical conception of the animal within recent scholarship in animal studies stems from a more general suspicion that such a conception serves ultimately to assimilate the animal to a fundamentally logocentric discourse and hence to reduce »animal problems to a principle that functions within the legibility of the animal: from animal to aniword« (Burt 2006, 166). The question of the animal thus turns out to have been thequestion of language all along. Conversely, however, we might also posit that thequestion of language has itself also always been the question of the animal. Whatwould it mean for literary studies if we were to take the implications of thisinvolution seriously? How can we be attentive to the specific way animals operatein literary texts as »functions of their literariness« (McHugh 2009, 490)? In otherwords, not merely as one trope in an author’s poetic arsenal that could easily bereplaced by any other, but rather as a specific problem to and for language andrepresentation as such.
Journal of the Kafka Society of America, 2014
This paper presents a reading of the prose fragment “Erinnerungen an die Kaldabahn” (1914) as a d... more This paper presents a reading of the prose fragment “Erinnerungen an die Kaldabahn” (1914) as a document of Kafka’s zoopoetics. I draw on Akira Lippit’s conception of ‘animetaphor’ as site of an irresoluble yet productive tension between animal being and figurative language. Animetaphor is an apt description of the function and status of animal figures in Kafka’s writing, in that it describes precisely the simultaneous construction and dissolution of meaning that is a salient characteristic of the ‘Kafkaesque.’ “Erinnerungen an die Kaldabahn” is an intensely ‘Kafkaesque’ text, and one of the principal reasons for this, I argue, is its engagement with the figure of the animal as at once the agent and the undoing of literary production.
The German Quarterly, 2011
Through a reading of Kafka's “Der Ausflug ins Gebirge” and the story of Echo and Narcissus in Ovi... more Through a reading of Kafka's “Der Ausflug ins Gebirge” and the story of Echo and Narcissus in Ovid's Metamorphoses, this paper explores the strategies employed by Kafka in creating a poetic self. Central to this maneuver are the complementary tropes of aphanisis, the “fading” of the subject upon contact with language, and prosopopoeia, the lending of a voice to a voiceless entity Kafka's text stages a “Ruf ohne Klang,” uttered by a silent “I” which is able to “lend” itself a voice only by fading away behind its own image. Unpacking the multiple resonances of the word “copia,” the essay explores the power of the echo, as producer of difference and meaning through repetition, to constitute an original utterance. In this way, Kafka's text may be read as a textual echo that preserves an utterance which otherwise could never have come into being.
Book Chapters by Kári Driscoll
Outside the Anthropological Machine: Crossing the Human-Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies. Edited by Chiara Mengozzi., 2020
In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida wonders whether it would be possible to think of the d... more In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida wonders whether it would be possible to think of the discourse on the animal in musical terms, and if so, whether one could change the key, or the tone of the music, by inserting a “flat” (bémol). The task would be to render audible “an unheard language or music” that would be “somewhat inhuman” but a language nonetheless. This chapter pursues this intriguing proposition by means of a reading of Franz Kafka’s final story, “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk,” paying careful attention to the controversy regarding the status of Josefine’s vocalizations (is it really singing? or perhaps rather squeaking, or whistling?), which, moreover, is mirrored in the scientific discourse surrounding the songs of actual mice. The voice plays a crucial role in almost all of Kafka’s animal narratives, in part because of the ancient tension between speech (logos), which is considered unique to humans, and voice (phonē), which we share with other living beings. Hence, the status of Josefine’s song, and of mouse song in general, obeys the logic of the anthropological machine. The task of this zoopoetic reading, then, is to show how Kafka’s text might unsettle, or even render inoperative, that logic.
The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies, 2020
Texts, Animals, Environments. Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics. Edited by Frederike Middelhoff, Sebastian Schönbeck, Roland Borgards, and Catrin Gersdorf, 2019
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliograf... more Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb.d-nb.de> abrufbar.
Kári Driscoll and Eva Hoffmann, eds. What Is Zoopoetics? – Texts, Bodies, Entanglement. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
Dominik Ohrem and Roman Bartosch, eds. Beyond the Human–Animal Divide: Creaturely Lives in Literature and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017
This chapter explores the exorbitant potential of animals to disrupt the representational framewo... more This chapter explores the exorbitant potential of animals to disrupt the representational frameworks into which they are placed, as exemplified by Luigi Pirandello’s 1915 novel Si gira! (Shoot!), which revolves around the on-screen killing of a tiger for a big-budget colonial adventure movie. This tiger serves as the focal point for Pirandello’s examination of the antinomies of reality and artifice, and yet the specific place and function of animality for his poetics has so far gone largely unnoticed. In this chapter, I read Pirandello’s tiger in relation to Akira Lippit’s claim that “animals resist metaphorization.” This resistance, arising from an irreducible discrepancy between the material and the semiotic—what the animal is and what the animal means—is, I argue, a central feature of zoopoetics.
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Edited Volumes by Kári Driscoll
Starting from this idea of media plurality, Book Presence in a Digital Age explores the resilience of print literatures, book art, and zines in the late age of print from a contemporary perspective, while incorporating longer-term views on media archeology and media change. Even as it focuses on the materiality of books and literary writing in the present, Book Presence also takes into consideration earlier 20th-century "moments" of media transition, developing the concepts of presence and materiality as analytical tools to perform literary criticism in a digital age. Bringing together leading scholars, artists, and publishers, Book Presence in a Digital Age offers a variety of perspectives on the past, present, and future of the book as medium, the complex relationship of materiality to virtuality, and of the analog to the digital.
Journal Articles by Kári Driscoll
Book Chapters by Kári Driscoll
Starting from this idea of media plurality, Book Presence in a Digital Age explores the resilience of print literatures, book art, and zines in the late age of print from a contemporary perspective, while incorporating longer-term views on media archeology and media change. Even as it focuses on the materiality of books and literary writing in the present, Book Presence also takes into consideration earlier 20th-century "moments" of media transition, developing the concepts of presence and materiality as analytical tools to perform literary criticism in a digital age. Bringing together leading scholars, artists, and publishers, Book Presence in a Digital Age offers a variety of perspectives on the past, present, and future of the book as medium, the complex relationship of materiality to virtuality, and of the analog to the digital.
Kafkas Zoopoetik wird von einer »grenzenlosen Transversalität« (Lippit) zwischen dem Tierischen und der Sprache bestimmt, insbesondere im Verhältnis zwischen Tier und Metapher. Ich beziehe mich hier auf die ›Animetapher‹, die Akira Lippit als den Inbegriff und zugleich den Gegensatz der Metapher beschreibt, das unauflösbare und produktive Spannungsfeld zwischen dem Tierischen und metaphorischer Sprache. Der Begriff der ›Animetapher‹ trifft auf die Funktion des Tierischen bei Kafka zu, indem er die gleichzeitige Sinnkonstruktion und -dissolution beschreibt, die Kernmerkale des Kafkaesken. Dabei ist das »Kaldabahn«-Fragment ein derart ›kafkaesker‹ Text, dass er bisweilen ans Selbstparodistische grenzt. Der Erzähler ist ein einsamer Stationswächter »im Innern Rußlands« dessen Bahnhütte unter ständigem Angriff durch eine Unzahl »eigentümliche[r] große[r] Ratten« steht, die in der Nacht unaufhörlich die Außenwände zu untergraben versuchen. Dieses nächtliche Graben entwickelt sich zu einer Metapher des Schreibens selbst, wobei es gleichzeitig auch vom Erzähler als etwas Fremdes und Bedrohliches wahrgenommen wird, das von außen kommt und das er vergeblich zu verhindern versucht. Dadurch wird das Tier zu einer Figur, die das Schreiben verkörpert aber auch ständig droht, dessen Grundlage zu unterminieren.
Each of these short texts, sparkling with erudition and humor, is devoted to a peculiar leonine presence—or, in many cases, absence—in literature, art, philosophy, religion, and politics. From Ecclesiastes to the New Testament Apocrypha, Dürer to Henri Rousseau, Aesop and La Fontaine to Rilke and Thomas Mann, the extraordinary breadth of Blumenberg’s knowledge and intellectual curiosity is on full display. Lions has much to offer readers, both those already familiar with Blumenberg’s oeuvre and newcomers looking for an introduction to the thought of one of Germany’s most important postwar philosophers.
As the men wander through this destroyed human landscape, Euphoria's nameless narrator reveals only small, shocking details - a crashed helicopter, a boy sitting impassively beside his murdered parents, a provincial nightclub full of charred bodies. Seeking food and fuel for the fire, but finding only the pointless remnants of their suddenly vanished world, the men realise that all they have left is their lives. And are those really worth anything in a world where their future has crumbled away, their past remains only as an empty taunt and their present is reduced to the monotonous trudge of animal survival?
An austere, troubling tale of how quickly men become beasts, Euphoria explores the repressed savagery of human nature and the disturbing meaningless of a world run free from society's restraints.
Set against the backdrop of Frankfurt’s affluent suburbs, this elliptical tale of coincidence and necessity unfolds through a series of masterly constructed vignettes, which gradually come together to form a scintillating portrait of the funny, tender, and destructive guises that love between two people can assume and the effect it has on everyone around them. Hailed in Germany as the first great social novel of the twenty-first century, What Was Before is an Elective Affinities for our time.